


Welcome to the New Age

by unwhithered



Series: Dreamers & Sailors [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: 501st Legion - Freeform, AU - everybody lives!, Gen, Torrent Company, echo never died, post the wrong jedi au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-06 21:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 35,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8769568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwhithered/pseuds/unwhithered
Summary: When Anakin and Ahsoka left the Jedi Order and the Grand Army of the Republic after the events of The Wrong Jedi, they didn't expect the 501st to follow on their heels - even though they should have. Drifting through the Outer Rim without a mission, a plan, or a clue, they have to find their own purpose and begin to construct new lives together, with the wrath of the Republic at their backs and an uncertain future ahead.





	1. Waking Up

**Author's Note:**

> This is a follow up to my fic _As Long As There Are Dreamers There Will Always Be Sailors_ , and you should definitely read that one first if you want to understand what's going on here.

“Alpha team in position.”

 

Fives rubs irritably at the unfamiliar comm jammed into his ear as Rex’s voice echoes inside his skull. Without his bucket he feels blind, deaf and dumb. A nursery droid had dropped a helmet onto his head almost as soon as he could toddle, and he had lived and fought inside of one every day since - every day until he stripped off his armor and followed his captain, commander and general into the unknown two weeks ago. He doesn’t regret it. He just misses his armor something fierce, with its 360 degree view, multitude of sensors, targeting assistance and built in communications system.

 

Daydreaming about it isn’t going to get it back, though, and he has a job to do. Brothers are relying on him.

 

Adjusting his visor, Fives replies just a beat too late. “Beta team in position.”

 

“Skywalker in position. Beta team, blow the doors.”

 

“Yes, sir.” This part Fives can do. In fact, breaking and entering is among his specialties as an ARC trooper. “3...2…”

 

_Bang._

 

After their locks explode in a shower of sparks the automatic doors do exactly what he expected, sliding into their emergency open position with a soft hiss. Tup rolls a droid popper past Fives and into the dark hall before the door in front of them is even halfway open. A few seconds later the EMP grenade goes off with a satisfying crackle, and Fives motions his four man squad past him and into the dim hall. Once again he finds himself wishing for his bucket - this time for its night vision sensors, as he blinks rapidly to adjust to the sudden lack of light.

 

The battle droids that hadn’t been taken out by the grenade have no such limitations. Blaster fire wings past his head while the world is still a dark blur, almost blinding him with the bright flashes of red lasers. Luckily, even half blind and wielding an unfamiliar weapon, Fives is a better shot and so are his men. Firing by sound and instinct, Fives presses forward and feels his men fall in behind him. They round a corner in a hail of blaster shots and keep going, stepping over fallen clankers along the way. Over the staticky comm channel Fives can hear Rex engaged in much the same situation, a constant murmur of creative swearing that must be Jesse, and Skywalker and Tano bantering back and forth as they cut their way efficiently toward the center of the complex even without lightsabers.

 

“We’re --” Panting, then swearing echoes down the line. Nobody says _kriff_ quite like Jesse. Whatever his vod was going to say is cut off as Fives hears an explosion on the other side of the complex vibrate through the air half a second before it blasts through the comm loudly enough to make him grit his teeth and clap his free hand over his ear. As if that would help. 

 

He keeps shooting with the other hand, cursing under his breath, “Kriffing hell--”

 

“The fuck was that?”

 

“Sith damned hells.”

 

Too much chatter, too many voices that his bucket would have automatically filtered out, and Fives is biting back more curses and drawing a breath to tell them to shut the kriff up when Rex’s voice does exactly that. Behind him there is a collective sigh of relief at the confirmation that their captain is still alive enough to be grumpy, which means that the rest of Alpha team must still be breathing too.

 

“They just opened up on us with the heavy guns,” Rex grumbles, as if anyone can mistake the thud-thud-thud of cannon fire in the background. It’s shaking the whole Sith-damned mountain the complex is built under hard enough that Fives is momentarily worried a few thousand tons of rock is about to come down on their heads. “Alpha team is digging in to draw their fire toward our position at the South entrance. Beta, this is your shot. Get in there with the explosives.”

 

“Roger, roger,” Fives replies breathlessly, skidding around another corner and taking aim at the droids running full tilt towards him. Is it still insubordination to mock his commanding officer if he isn’t actually in the army anymore? The thought will have to wait. “Let’s move, boys.”

 

The best at navigating without a map thanks to his extra training, Fives leads the way through the next skirmish and into a blessedly empty corridor, his brothers strung out behind him and Tup bringing up the rear. Claxons have begun to blare overhead, emergency lights flashing in time with them and bathing the world in a red glow that makes it easier to sight and shoot the few droid patrols they run into after that. Alpha is doing their job, though, and the further they go the fewer clankers they see. Most seem to be running toward the steadily growing sound of battle at the South entrance.

 

 _Stupid machines_ , Fives thinks, shooting one in the back. The rules of engagement don’t apply when your enemies are tin cans.

 

\-----------------

 

All of the fuel, ammunition and manufacturing equipment stockpiled inside a droid factory the size of a small city make for a beautiful explosion. Roaring infernos burst from every entrance, and Ahsoka is far enough away to see jets of flame escaping the vents cut into the remote mountainside. When the ground begins to shake beneath their feet her grin grows positively feral, showing a mouth full of pointed teeth smeared with her blue-tinted blood - an expression reflected on her master’s dirt streaked face as they watch a small earthquake block every entrance to the Sith-damned place. Obi-Wan would be accusing Anakin of passing on his bad habits to his padawan right now, while not even trying to hide the gleeful glint in his own eyes at a job well done and a satisfyingly huge _boom_ \- but Obi-Wan isn’t with them, and might never be again, a thought that dulls the smile on Ahsoka’s lips. 

 

Still, she jostles her shoulder against the trooper nearest to her - Echo, she knows without looking - surprised to feel the give of cloth and flesh rather than cold, hard armor even after weeks of adjustment. “Good job, boys. Let’s go home.”

 

\----------

 

 _Home_ is a repurposed slave transport in high orbit, with faulty sound dampeners and entire sections dubbed too filthy for use and sealed off. It’s not the worst place Anakin and Ahsoka have ever lived, and it’s certainly better than any number of places the clones have rested their heads over the course of the war, but there’s something...lacking, about the scratched metal walls and the patchwork technology of the bridge. 

 

Anakin and Ahsoka drop their packs on the dented central console, followed by ten troopers who file out once relieved of their burdens. Rex, Fives, Echo and several of the clone officers stay, upending their own packs and then all of the others to scatter gems, precious metals, and jumbled currencies across the surface. It’s a small fortune, all of it illegal in Republic space and therefore valuable in the outer rim and Separatist systems, where what few credits they’ve managed to scrape together are worthless.

 

“Maybe we should take up piracy,” Anakin mutters, bouncing a green jewel in his palm before holding it up to watch it refract light. “It definitely pays better than soldiering.”

 

“What was it you said, sir? ‘Don’t think of it as stealing, think of it as reclaiming illegally obtained assets from the Separatists and doing the Republic a favor in the process?’” Rex replies drily, pulling out a datapad and squinting at the piles that his brothers are neatly sorting from the mess. “I don’t know what half of this osik is, but it’s got to be enough to get us refueled, resupplied, and buy some real weapons. Right?”

 

For a fraction of a second, the confident and competent Captain of the 501st looks lost, glancing at his Jedi for some kind of reassurance. Every one of them is out of their depth. Out here, floating above a backwater planet whose only occupants they’ve just blown off the face of the earth, there are no orders. No greater plan for advancing the goals of the Republic. The chain of command comes to an abrupt stop at Anakin Skywalker, former Jedi General, whose experience is only marginally more relevant to their new lifestyle than that of the men who follow him. 

 

Mostly, they’ve been making things up as they go along, having hit on the idea of attacking the remote Separatist production plans that GAR command deemed unimportant. They’re the kind of places that hoard resources and churn out endless battalions of droids to cut clones down by the hundreds. With a small army of restless troopers at their back, still eager to do their part to protect the vod they had left behind, it hadn’t been hard to convince them of the plan’s merits and put together a rough list of targets. So far, it’s been a lucrative venture. One that gives them purpose.

 

“Right,” Anakin finally agrees, his teeth shining white in his dirt streaked face as he flashes a smile at his Captain. He abandons the jewel in favor of a handful of honest to gods flimsi bills, counting them out silently. “This is Hutt currency. As long as no one asks questions about where we got it, there’s enough here to keep us going for weeks. _If_ we’re willing to venture into Hutt space…”

 

“I don’t think we have a choice, Master,” Ahsoka points out with a grimace.

 

“I know, Snips. Plot us a course to…”


	2. It's A Revolution I Suppose

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the purposes of this fic (and my emotional stability in general) Echo didn't die during the Citadel arc in season 3. Instead he was seriously injured in the explosion, and Fives carried his ass all the way to the rendezvous point. By the time they got him into decent medical care even bacta couldn't fix everything, and he was left with pretty serious scarring down the right side of his body and a permanent limp - the only thing that kept him from being sent back to Kamino and quietly "decommissioned" by the GAR was a lot of slight of hand on Rex, Fives and Anakin's parts, but he's alive!

**_Tatooine,_ 16 Galactic Standard Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

Anakin Skywalker does not want to be here. The Lars family moisture farm is on the other side of the planet, and yet the second he sets foot in the burning afternoon sand he can taste blood on the back of his tongue. His flesh hand reaches for the familiar, reassuring weight of his lightsaber hilt and closes around a worn blaster grip instead. More than ever, he regrets throwing his lightsaber at the Council’s feet when he left the Order - the dramatic effect was top notch, but he feels the loss of his weapon like a physical ache in his empty hands. She hasn’t said it, but Anakin knows Ahsoka feels the same, has seen her reaching for dual hilts that no longer rest where they have for years and flinching away when she finds nothing there.

After a moment of flexing his empty hand irritably, Anakin glances over at his _former_  padawan. The sudden lack of official rank has been another hard transition for all of them.

Next to him, Ahsoka is yawning and rubbing at her bleary eyes - it’s technically the night cycle on their ship, which means half of the crew is grumbling about the inconvenience of interplanetary travel despite the fact that it’s all they’ve known for years. The other half seems to be muttering curses about the weather or staring jealously at the men who are going planetside. Everyone is restless - and hungry. They’ve been rationing supplies for several days and Anakin knows he isn’t the only one dreaming of a full belly.

“The port manager was just as corrupt as you expected, and cheaper,” Rex reports, strolling up with his hands tucked casually into his pockets. He looks like he bribes spaceport overseers not to ask for ship credentials all of the time. He also looks like exactly the kind of ruffian who does so, with a week’s worth of dark beard growth and black roots showing beneath the bleached tips of his hair. After running a hand over his own scruffy face, Anakin mentally adds clippers and hair color to their supply list.

“We should hurry up before he gets nosy,” Anakin replies, turning toward the small gathering of men at the base of their ship’s ramp. “You all know the drill. Spread out, stay in pairs, and don’t stay in any one place for long. Nobody pays much attention to Republic news feeds out here, but I don’t want anyone getting too curious about a bunch of guys who look the same. Snips, Echo, you’re with me.”

Two dozen troopers in a motley array of civilian clothing and cleverly hidden weapons nod their understanding and start trailing off in pairs, staggering their exits to avoid drawing too much attention from the port crew. Rex and Fives are off to find a disreputable weapons dealer or two, relying on Fives’ knack for finding trouble and Rex’s talent for pulling him out of it. Anakin, Echo, and Ahsoka have a long list of parts to pick up for ship and landing shuttle repairs, while someone else bargains for fuel and half a dozen pairs search for rations and clothing. Every trooper in the legion is clamoring for something blue to stand in for their lost armor.

Echo already has his, a blue strip of cloth tied around his left wrist like a makeshift - and useless - arm guard. Anakin can see the faint outline of a vibroblade hidden beneath. Shaggy hair hangs over Echo’s brow, and the mottled and uneven burn scar spreading across the right side of his face and down his neck virtually guarantees that he won’t be recognized as a clone even by someone familiar with galactic news. 

The distinct limp left over from Echo’s injuries at the Citadel slows him down in the sand when it’s their turn to set off, but not much. Ahsoka trails slightly behind with him, keeping an eye out for trouble, while Anakin forges ahead searching for a parts shop. 

The first place they stop at is a bust, more junk than usable parts. The second yields what Anakin needs to repair one of the slavers’ broken shuttles, and the third sells them a weapons system interface at half price after a subtle mind trick. Given that the blustering, red faced human shopkeeper owns a couple of collared slaves, Anakin doesn’t feel bad about the mind control. In fact, the shopkeeper should be glad Anakin is paying him at all. Or letting him live.

Sensing his anger rippling through the Force, Ahsoka leaves her whispered conversation with one of the slave women and crosses the store to touch Anakin’s elbow. Not a restraint, but a reminder - Anakin has a thousand lives relying on him for their safety and continued freedom, and he cannot risk his men for the sake of a few slaves. No matter how much he wants to. 

Ahsoka curls her fingers around his arm as they give delivery instructions and turn towards the door, Echo limping up to bracket his other side without quite touching. This, too, is new and strange. They Jedi Order is utterly unashamed of the physical body, teaching that it is a vessel for the force to be cherished and cared for, not hidden in shame. Their teachings on physical affection are not so liberal. The clones have no such boundaries - as Rex told Anakin early in the war, the only comfort they have ever had is what they can give each other. No parents, no creche-mates or masters to hold them through a nightmare. No heartbeats to lull them to sleep except the ones that beat so much like their own.

Over the course of the war...well, the war broke down all kinds of boundaries, especially personal, but the Jedi did not dare display the habits they learned from clones so publicly.

Now there is no one to frown and preach about attachment when Ahsoka squeezes her master’s arm, her skin cooler and comforting through his coarse overshift. His anger remains a caged beast, pacing just beneath the surface, but he projects a renewed calm through their training bond to reassure her. He’ll be fine just as soon as they get off this burning, backwards planet.

“You know, when I joined the Order I thought I would help end slavery on planets like this,” he admits, looking down at Ahsoka. “Instead I ended up leading a slave army.”

Echo’s voice surprises him, low and gruff and accompanied by a brush of their shoulders. “Not anymore, sir. And never again.”

Anakin is opening his mouth to remind Echo that freedom from the army means not having to call him _sir_ anymore when Ahsoka’s grip tightens on his arm and she comes to an abrupt halt. Echo takes several more steps before freezing in place as well, his nostrils flaring in anger as he looks at something ahead.

Cutting his gaze sideways, Anakin takes in Ahsoka’s expression and tries to read if it is disgust or anger blanching her skin to a sickly yellow-orange. The wave of nausea projecting down their bond hits him a moment later. His padawan has held men’s guts in with her bare hands while waiting for a medic, picked through the ruins of cities razed by the Seppies, and watched her friends die by the dozen. And something is making her sick at just the sight.

Guessing what isn’t hard when a sharp  _crack_  jerks his head up.

“Worthless bitch,” snarls a not-quite-human voice. “You’re not worth the pittance I paid for you. I should kill you and save us both the trouble - “

\---------

“Master - “ Ahsoka starts, voice too high and trembling a little, hand clenched tight on his sleeve.

It isn’t Anakin who moves first. One minute Echo is stock still, quiet in the force, and the next he is whirlwind-anger and a knife is buried in the throat of a man across the market square from them. The energy whip in his hand turns off with a crackle as his knees buckle, and Ahsoka can feel that he’s dead before he hits the ground. In the next second, chaos erupts.

Ahsoka reaches for a lightsaber that isn’t there, pulls out a blaster instead, and dives for the slave woman that Echo just saved from a brutal beating, all in the space of a breath. She curls to shield the Mirialan woman’s huddled body as the first weapon discharges behind her. Anakin is a tornado of blistering rage hotter than the sand beneath Ahsoka’s knees, battering at her consciousness and quickly dwarfing the storm of Echo’s temper. Since the accident at the Citadel Echo’s fuse has been shorter, his anger closer to the surface - Kix had said something about traumatic stress and chronic pain that Ahsoka can’t remember in the heat of battle. All she knows is that he fights with vicious fury despite his bad leg and the pain he radiates into the Force.

“Can you move?” She asks the shaking woman beneath her. After receiving what might be a nod, Ahsoka hauls them both upright and pushes her toward the nearest open air stall. The proprietor appears to have fled. “Stay there until I tell you it’s safe to come out.” _Or until I’m dead_ , Ahsoka thinks with the morbid humor of someone who has faced death too many times to count at just sixteen.

A blaster wings Ahsoka’s arm before she can wait for an affirmative response, and she hopes the girl has some sense in her pain and fear addled mind. There’s little else she can do for her. Not when her master needs her.

She turns and shoots in the same motion, letting the force guide her shot before she even locks eyes on her target. He folds over the pain of a blaster bolt to the gut and she moves on in the next breath, searching for Anakin and Echo in the dust and bodies and screams. There are already too many bodies - a heavy set Twi’lek still holding a blaster a foot away, an old man wearing a collar lifelessly sprawled in front of a crying boy without shoes, a  Zabrak spitting curses as he bleeds out from a sloppy knife wound inflicted by a young, pregnant, barely clothed slave woman.

All of the tension boiling beneath the surface of this backwards hell hole has erupted like a geyser. _A geyser of blood._ Ahsoka shakes the thought off as she takes in the scene. The next ten minutes blend together as instinct and muscle memory take over for her rational mind. Voices over the comm she wears barely register until suddenly she is back to back with Rex, staring down a group of men pouring out of the local watering hole with weapons in hand.

“What’d you do this time, little’un?” Rex asks, moving with her as easily as if they were dancing in an empty ballroom. 

Ahsoka shoots a man trying to drag a collared boy out of the fray by his hair and has one second to appreciate the relief on his face before she takes aim at a snarling, armed woman advancing on Echo from behind. Fives gets there first, taking up guard at his batchmate’s back and supporting Echo when he stumbles. “It wasn’t me!” she finally manages to protest in a half-second pause while searching for a new threat. “There was a slave being beaten and threatened, and Echo just lost it. Skyguy jumped right in after him. What was I supposed to do?”

Rex growls, kicks a man in the teeth, and pushes her out of the way of a stray shot all while managing to curse fouly in Mando’a. “Echo used to be the smart one out of those two shabuir. Har’chaak. If he lives, I’m killing him.”

There are no more words after that. Not until the last blaster has discharged and the dust has begun to settle out of the dry desert air. Then, Ahsoka bends to rest her elbows on her knees and breathes like a bellows as she takes stock of their situation. The Force is roiling with pain and death and...joy? Beneath it all pulses the steady, familiar energy of a thousand souls as dear to her as her own. She can practically taste the adrenaline coursing through those nearest to her, but best of all is the realization that she can sense no mourning. Not from her brothers.

Safe in that knowledge, she sits heavily in the first clear patch of dirt she can find.

\------ 

“It appears you incited a slave rebellion, sir,” Rex reports, after accounting for all of his men. Bumps, bruises, and blaster burns were had all around - nothing that a little bacta won’t fix. The drills he’s going to run them through for starting this disaster will hurt far worse.

“It appears we did,” Skywalker agrees, unrepentant. Not for the first time - and doubtless not for the last - Rex has to resist the urge to box his general’s ears as if he were a misbehaving shiny.

“Half the city is on fire. It’s going to be hours before it burns out enough for us to get back to the spaceport, if there’s any spaceport left. The boys aboard the ship are lifting into low orbit to avoid drawing any more attention than we already _have_ during this side trip.” Rex crosses his (too light) arms over his (too narrow) chest and stares his general down. “Should we be worried about local authorities showing up? Or the Hutt’s hired guns?”

Anakin shakes his head, watching smoke rise on the other side of the city. “Not here. This is a backwater even for Tatooine. There won’t be anyone our men can’t handle. Set up a perimeter and a few lookouts and we’ll be fine.”

Rex nods and goes to do just that. An order is an order, even when his general is a di’kut.

\-----

“I’m sorry, Captain. General.” Echo’s hands are clasped loosely behind his back, his body automatically falling into something like parade rest regardless of his protesting muscles and old wounds. He bows his head in a show of apology and glances at Ahsoka out of the corner of his eye in an attempt to gauge how much trouble he might be in. “I lost control, and I endangered the mission and the lives of my brothers. But I’ll take my consequences gladly, knowing there are a few less slavers in the galaxy because of what I did. A few less men abusing the helpless. I only wish I had taken down the ones who ran rather than fought, sir.”

“Don’t apologize,” the General orders unexpectedly. Echo’s head jerks up in surprise, and one of Rex’s eyebrows is raised in the way that means Skywalker has rewritten the plan without telling him (again). His ori’vod does _not_ look pleased. “You did what we should have all along. What the Republic should be doing rather than razing half the galaxy. If you had walked away, that woman,” Skywalker nods toward a Mirialan women huddled up against a wall, flinching every time Kix attempts to wash rubble from her lash marks, “would be dead. And we would have been complicit.”

Relief floods the part of Echo that still craves his Jedi’s approval over all else. Some part of him will never be able to forget that he was bred and raised for the jetii, their perfect soldier, no matter how fallible they ended up being in reality. Skywalker, at least, has never done wrong by the clones - and it seems Echo didn’t do wrong by him today.

“I see you trying not to roll your eyes, Captain,” Skywalker says, and even though he isn’t looking at Rex he is exactly right about the man’s expression. “I’m sure you can come up with a suitable punishment for jumping the gun, but if you want to punish Echo for rebelling against an unjust system...well, I think you’ll need to punish us all.”

“Yes, sir.” Echo can practically _hear_ Rex’s thoughts about unit cohesion and mission objectives. He can also see the way his brother’s eyes soften when he glances at the scene around them, troopers in civilian clothes clearing rubble and deactivating the collars of slaves slowly daring to venture out of their hiding places. Still, Rex claps Echo on the shoulder on his way past, squeezing hard enough that it would have been felt through armor and is frankly painful on unprotected flesh. Echo leans into it anyway. “The General is right. You did the right thing, vod’ika - but we’ll be having a long talk about your methods later. You aren’t an ARC Trooper now. You’ve got to start thinking of the whole legion again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mando'a translations:
> 
> shabuir = a fairly foul insult that is officially translated (stupidly) as "jerk, but much stronger"
> 
> haar'chak = damn it
> 
> di'kut = idiot/fool
> 
> ori'vod = big brother/big sister
> 
> vod'ika = little brother


	3. Ash and Dust

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really didn't mean for this to take so long, but life happened. Work was crazy, my sister came home from college for break, we spent my Christmas holiday from work emptying my family's storage unit...all that great stuff. But I finally got some time to write today! 
> 
> Thank you fuzzytale for beta-ing as usual. And if you're interested in the God Damn Clone Feels playlist I've been listening to while writing this fic, you can find it [here](http://unwhithered.tumblr.com/post/155028490945/my-god-damn-clone-feels-playlist-for-fic-writing) on my tumblr. I've also been posting some snippets of the fic on tumblr as I'm writing, if you're interested in seeing some of it without waiting so long.

**_Tatooine,_ ** **17 Galactic Standard Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

A few hours turns into a few days.

On the first afternoon, they build makeshift barricades around the market square and settle in to wait out the fire - by the time the sun rises behind the last wisps of smoke, it is not just the 501st and survivors of the initial firefight scattered around the market. Rex looks out upon a many colored sea of faces as he scans the area, counting his men and taking in the others at the same time. Young, old, slave, free, landing on the whole spectrum of species and genders...the only thing they have in common is their fear of the conflict still raging throughout their town, and the hope that they have found safety behind the 501st’s carefully watched barriers. It’s not unlike many urban battles Rex has been in, where citizens looked for shelter with the side they had assessed as least likely to harm them.

Protecting people like this is what the clones had been bred for, and Rex craves the familiarity more than he likes to admit, even to himself. Brothers die every day fighting for a Republic they barely know, but they have a purpose. In service of the Republic there are clear lines between right and wrong, strict objectives, and orders to follow. It had been awful. It had also been the only thing he knew. Now he is flying without a star chart, and staring at a hundred desperate faces looking to him for help.

And for the first time in a long time, he feels something like hope. He clicks on his comm channel with the lieutenant in command on their ship.

“Brothers, it looks like this has just become a humanitarian mission, not an evacuation. Send down another fifty troopers and every medic we’ve got. We have work to do.”

\-----------------

“Clear,” Wrecker calls, ducking out of a small hut on the edge of a larger compound. Rex has deployed the majority of his men in groups of ten, dividing the small city into a grid and methodically working through it. Mostly, they’ve been breaking up fights and sifting through rubble, locating wounded and scared civilians.

On the other side of town Anakin and Ahsoka are busy negotiating with a group of former slaves that has seized the local prison and begun locking up their former masters. The troopers need somewhere to put the townsfolk who have decided to take advantage of the current anarchy to commit theft and violence, and the remaining slavers that they drag out of hiding. The locals don’t seem keen to surrender even a fraction of their newfound control, if the occasional bursts of comm chatter from the prison are anything to go by.

Kriff, Rex is glad he isn’t stuck with his jetiise. He finishes sweeping his own hut - a slave’s quarters, he thinks, based on the bare mattress and sparse possessions - and steps back out to join his men. “Everyone’s clear?” After double-checking to make sure they haven’t missed any civilian stragglers, Rex grunts in satisfaction. “On to the master’s house, then.”

The door to what can only charitably be called a mansion is locked and barred, but made of decorative wood. Rex sneers at the sheer arrogance of assuming money can keep anyone so safe that they don’t need proper defenses. When the screaming starts inside, he takes perhaps a little too much pleasure in personally kicking the useless doors down. Inside, a Devaronian is holding a blaster to the temple of a pretty Twi’lek woman with a baby in her arms, while more girls in collars huddle against the far wall.

“Get out, or I’ll kill them all,” the master spits in Huttese.

After two and a half years of serving under General Skywalker, Rex understands just enough of that to make him snarl. “That was the wrong thing to say,” he growls back in Basic, raising his blaster while his brothers fan out behind him. The slightest twitch of his free hand prompts Tank and Jumper to inch closer to the girls, ready to shield them should the Devaronian start firing, while their target focuses on Rex’s raised gun and fiery glare.

“Do not test me--” Whatever else the Devaronian might have said is cut off by the appearance of a smoking hole in his forehead. Rex reholsters his blaster and dusts off his hands as the body crumples, sinking to the ground in a lifeless, harmless heap at his slave-woman’s feet. She starts screaming anyway.

  _Civilians._

\-----------

By the time Ahsoka’s party makes it back to their makeshift camp her head aches and her mouth is parched. Tomorrow her skin will doubtless be peeling from exposure to the relentless desert sun, and she can already picture the lecture Kix is going to give her about Togrutan susceptibility to skin cancer. None of it matters. She holds in her arms the daughter of a slave, whose parents were born to slaves, and so on stretching back at least five generations. This three month old is the first member of her family to breathe free air in well over a hundred years, and she doesn’t even know it. All she seems to care about at the moment is tracing the patterns on Ahsoka’s leks and cooing softly to herself, completely unaware of the chaos around her, or the fact that Fives is carrying her mother in much the same way that Ahsoka is carrying the baby.

A medic meets them at the makeshift barrier, directing his brothers toward a building on the other side of the square. The ground floor of what must be a low-rent hotel has been cleared of furniture and set up as a field hospital, and almost every inch of floor space is taken up by civilians waiting for medical attention. Ahsoka shifts the baby in her arms, tucking the child’s head against her shoulder to shield her eyes from the unpleasantness of the scene around them while she takes it all in. There are plenty of blaster burns and knife wounds on display, along with all the other injuries Ahsoka has learned to associate with the aftermath of battle, but what draws her eye are injuries she hasn’t seen since Zygerria - flayed skin and bruised throats, deliberate burns, the raw rings of skin and scar tissue where tight collars have been fixed around slaves’ necks for years. It’s enough to make her stomach roil, yet she doesn’t dare avert her eyes to spare herself the sight. Something inside of Ahsoka is telling her that it would be unforgivably weak to look away, that she must bear witness to the suffering in this room.

For a moment she just stands in the doorway, helpless and overwhelmed by the carnage she isn’t used to seeing outside of a war zone. It takes Fives bumping into her on the way to set his unconscious cargo down in an empty corner to shake her out of her stupor. Ahsoka has already done what she can for the young mother with her limited force healing skills; now it’s up to the medics Rex brought down from the ship to help her. Ahsoka takes a deep breath, shoves her worry for the other woman aside, and steps further into the hotel. The Force is tugging at her, telling her that there are others she can help, ways she can still make herself useful now that the fighting is over.

Shifting the baby onto her right hip, Ahsoka follows the Force’s call.

Echo trails after her like a silent shadow as she moves through the haphazard rows of patients. While she draws the pain out of a crying boy with a crushed leg and dispels it into the Force, he listens to the boy’s brother explain how they had been trapped in their master’s shop by falling rubble. When she kneels to speak to a woman with a bloody, lash-marked back, Echo digs antiseptic ointment and a box of gauze out of a nearby medic’s kit and passes it to her without being asked. He even holds the baby - awkwardly, as if she is made of glass and he might accidentally crush her in his big, rough hands - while Ahsoka smoothes the ointment on and murmurs reassuring words meant only for the woman’s ears. They go on like that, speaking softly to the patients awaiting care, offering assistance to the medics when needed, and passing the baby back and forth all the while, until they’ve made a full circuit of the ground floor.

Ahsoka is grateful to find that her first patient is finally awake, and more than happy to pass the baby sleeping in her arms back to its mother. “Your little girl is beautiful,” she murmurs as she crouches beside them, because mothers love to hear that kind of thing. “What’s her name?”

“Mia,” the woman replies in shaky, broken Basic. “Her name is Mia, after my grandmother. And yours?”

“Ahsoka, and this is Echo.” Ahsoka emphasizes his name out of habit - too many sentients believe her vode are little more than droids made flesh, and therefore undeserving of names. She’s made it something of a personal mission to impress upon others that each trooper is an individual with his own name, his own personality, his own pattern of speech. Sometimes it works. Too often it doesn’t.

The woman doesn’t look surprised that Echo has a name, doesn’t flash him the look of disdain so common from civilians. Instead she sounds out their names several times, curling her tongue around the foreign syllables until she can say them without a stutter before speaking again. “You have my thanks, _Ah-_ soka and Echo. I owe you my life, I think.”

“You owe us nothing,” Echo replies before Ahsoka can, crouching down beside them. He reaches out to ruffle Mia’s downy hair with his unscarred hand and smiles when the baby grabs his fingers - it’s a strange and unfamiliar sight, her trooper cooing at a child as if he wasn’t deathly afraid of dropping her just hours ago, and it makes Ahsoka’s heart clench. If only the rest of the galaxy could see moments like this, maybe the vod’e would be free...she shakes the pointless thought off and stands. Her brothers will be given nothing they don’t fight for, and thinking otherwise is a foolish dream. A childish one - and the war has done its best to kill the child in them all. “It’s a privilege to help you and your daughter, ma’am. Ask for Kix if you need anything. He’s the best medic anyone could want.”

It’s not until they’ve left the stifling misery of the field hospital behind that Ahsoka realizes she never asked the woman’s name. Before she can turn back to do just that, her master waves to her from across the square. She’s needed elsewhere, and so Mia’s mother becomes one of an uncountable number of nameless civilians she’ll likely never see again.

\---------

**18 Galactic Standard Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

Midnight finds Fives on the roof of the hotel his Captain and General have turned into their makeshift base of operations. There are beds downstairs, the kind with real mattresses and clean sheets and almost no chance of bedbugs, but they feel and smell all wrong. Up here the wind is dry and gritty, carrying with it the smell of endless desert, and the sky is lit by more stars than he can count. It’s just like dozens of other backwater worlds he’s been on, and the familiarity may even let him sleep for a few hours. But not yet - not while the wind is still carrying voices up to him, singing songs of freedom not so different from his brothers’ own.

\--------

A few feet away from Fives, Ahsoka sits on cold duracrete as comfortably as she would on a meditation mat. The past three years have left her without one more often than not anyway. She crosses her legs, her back ramrod straight, and the only oddity about her position is the way Echo settles in to lay with his head resting in her lap. Echo can’t sit cross legged, and probably never will again. It’s the least of what the accident at the Citadel stole from him. When his temper raged and his body’s slow, painful recovery frustrated him, Ahsoka had offered to teach him meditation to calm and focus his mind. After Umbara she had expanded their lessons to instruct what seemed like half of the 501st, but Echo practices it most consistently - once they found a position that doesn’t aggravate his old wounds. He’s desperately in need of the peace meditation brings today, having pushed himself too far in the past two days until pain is radiating from him in sickening waves.

Resting her hands on Echo’s cheeks, Ahsoka lets herself drift. The Force is loud and chaotic in this place, so she narrows her focus. She can hear the steady thud of Echo’s heart, the whoosh of his breath as it evens and slows, and Fives shifting nearby. Echo feels green, like summer on the lush wilderness planets that all of the clones find so fascinating after their sterile upbringing on Kamino, shot through with the bitter gray sadness that plagues all of his brothers, and an undercurrent of white hot anger that reminds her of Anakin in a fight. Breathing out her own pain, sadness and resentment, Ahsoka projects peace toward Echo. He lets her in, more aware than most non Force sensitives, which she can only assume is the result of so long spent meditating together.

The sound of Fives disassembling and cleaning his new blaster beside them soothes them both with its familiarity. To Ahsoka he feels like sky blue freedom, sun warm loyalty, and the cold black of empty space in equal parts. When she tried to teach Fives to meditate he either spent the whole time fidgeting or fell asleep, but cleaning his weapons and organizing his kit is almost as soothing to him as opening herself to and releasing her emotions into the Force is for a jedi. _Former Jedi_. When he pauses in his movements and falls silent Ahsoka reaches out to touch the back of his hand without opening her eyes. Her other hands still rests on Echo’s stubble roughened jaw, stroking back and forth over his sharp cheekbone on the unscarred side.

Slowly, so slowly that her hips begin to ache from sitting in the same position for so long, Echo’s pain drains away. His body relaxes, his head tipping back in her lap. By the time he surfaces from the deep, calm place he spent months building in his own mind, Ahsoka has long been alert to the outside world. Fives has moved to sit shoulder to shoulder with her, and reaches out to touch Echo’s arm when he opens his eyes with a soft sigh.

“Better?” Fives asks.

“Better,” Echo confirms. Some of the lines of pain and tension have disappeared from around his eyes when he finally sits up, and Ahsoka feels no pain radiating from him when he scoots back to bracket her on the other side, a rare occurrence. She lets herself slump out of her perfect posture and lean against his shoulder - she knows they miss their armor, perhaps even more than she misses her lightsabers, but they _are_ far more comfortable to sit beside without it. In the safety of their presence and lulled by the songs still drifting up from below, she hovers on the gray edges of sleep.

After what could be minutes, but is probably hours, Ahsoka hears a familiar set of footsteps approaching. She grumbles a protest when Rex shakes Fives awake, and whines as cold air rushes in to replace his warmth at her side. Without opening her eyes she can tell that Fives has stood and snapped to attention to take orders from his captain. “The watch is yours, Lieutenant,” Rex says, sinking down to take Fives’ place before Ahsoka can whine too much.

“Don’t get too comfortable, Snips,” Anakin butts in as he joins them, throwing himself down near Ahsoka’s feet. “You’re up next.”

Huffing her acknowledgement, Ahsoka settles back in with her head on Rex’s shoulder, Echo’s warmth at her side, and billions of stars spread out above them. They’re thousands of lightyears from anything she knows, but anywhere that she’s surrounded by brothers is the next best thing to a home.

\-------

In the morning they offer transport off planet for anyone who wants it, but no one takes them up on it. Most have family still enslaved in other towns that they hope to someday reunite with, while others are simply too scared to leave the planet of their birth. With nothing more that they can do to help outside of staging a full scale invasion of the planet to free all slaves - which Anakin is silently in favor of - they finally pack up and return to their ship dirty, exhausted, but bearing almost all of the supplies they set out to buy. Including enough bleach to keep Rex blond for months, thanks to an old woman with a kind smile who had given half of the troopers haircuts as they waited for the medics to finish a last check on their patients.

“Where to next, General?” Rex asks, running his hand across the neatly buzzed and bleached spikes of his hair as they approach the bridge.

“Anywhere but Hutt space,” Anakin suggests.

“Good enough for me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this chapter was a bit rambling and pointless, but I'm really trying to establish the 501st-as-family feel right now.


	4. For A Better Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And here the actual plot begins...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you fuzzytale for beta-ing for me, and everyone who has liked and commented!
> 
> Chapter titled after For A Better Day by Avicii, which is a staple in my God Damn Clone Feels Playlist.

**_Outer Rim,_ ** **30 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

Anakin stares up at the ceiling of his cabin, though he might as well be looking right through it. “Padme said there’s a reward for information about our location, but the Order and the Grand Army are too busy to do anything about it themselves.” He laughs harshly, as if there is anything at all amusing about their current situation. Their ship has been drifting aimlessly in space for over a week, most of its occupants idle for the first time in their lives. Anakin is about ready to start smashing what little furniture there is in his cabin just for something to do. “No one even heard about what we did on Tatooine as far as she knows. I guess the war is working in our favor for once.”

Further down the bunk, Ahsoka huffs - in scorn or disbelief, Anakin doesn’t know. He kicks his feet up into her lap and pokes her under the ribs with his toes. “Do you miss her, Master?” She asks after a long pause.

“Yes,” he answers honestly. He misses Padme’s smile, and the spark in her eyes when she gets sidetracked onto a long rant about injustice in the galaxy - all the things about her that he fell in love with as a boy and again as a young man. He misses the way she fits in his arms, too, but he’s been missing that for a long time already. Their love affair had been short and passionate and quickly snuffed out by the harsh reality of the war, something he tries not to dwell on. Whenever he does the black pit of anger and jealousy in his chest threatens to expand and eat up every bit of serenity and fair mindedness his master ever managed to teach him. 

A beat of silence passes before he surfaces from his thoughts and continues. “But I miss Obi-wan more. He’d know what to do. He always does.”

“Yeah, and half the time you disagree with him about it.” Just for that, Anakin pokes her again. “...I miss him too.”

“I know, Snips. I know.”

A sigh, and when Anakin briefly lifts his head to look Ahsoka is staring up at the ceiling as well, her own feet slung over Rex’s shoulder where he sits on the floor with his back against the bunk. “Well we’ve got to do  _ something _ before we all go crazy.”

“The men are getting restless,” Rex adds, his first comment in over an hour. It’s after ship midnight and they have no good reason to be up. They have no good reason to sleep, either. There isn’t a battle or even a mandatory training exercise waiting for them in the morning. Anakin has done every bit of maintenance he can think of on the shuttles already, and Ahsoka and Rex have sparred with the ARC troopers and each other until they were falling over every day for a week. Every single person aboard ship is bored out of their kriffing minds. “Tatooine helped, but they need something else. Soon. Orders, a mission…”

“What if we gave them something else like Tatooine?”

“What do you mean, Snips?”

“It felt right, didn’t it? Helping free those people, locking up their masters? Didn’t you say that’s what jedi are supposed to do, Skyguy?” Ahsoka leans forward, her eyes lighting up as she continues. Anakin suspects this is an idea she’s been turning over in her own head for awhile. Maybe even since before they left Tatooine’s atmosphere. “So maybe we aren’t jedi anymore, but the jedi are busy fighting a war, and nobody’s keeping the peace in their place. Can’t we do that? The little things that are getting ignored, the stuff you and I were trained for as younglings? Slave traffickers, drug rings, pirates in the shipping lanes?”

“I don’t know, Ahsoka…” Anakin starts, only for her to talk right over him at the first sign of a negative response.

“C’mon, Master. The longer this war has dragged on, the more lawless the galaxy has been getting. We have the men, the training, the information…”

“We can’t just run around trampling on Republic law.”

“The Republic trampled on us first!” she snaps back. Almost immediately her gaze drops and the fight goes out of her posture as fast as it came, replaced by shame. They haven’t talked about what happened since the day after they left. Communication has never been their specialty, and without Obi-wan to prompt it...Anakin has been keeping his thoughts trained on the future, not the past, for fear of what he might do if he lingers on the injustice of what happened to his padawan for too long. “And they’re letting other people get hurt too. We can do this. We can  _ help _ . Right, Rexter?”

“I don’t know, little’un, if the Gen--” Anakin’s narrowed eyes cut him off. “If  _ Anakin _ thinks it’s a bad idea…”

“Forget about me, Rex. What do  _ you _ think?” Anakin prompts. He’s always trusted his Captain’s input - in many ways, Rex is better prepared to lead men than he is, and far more extensively trained in the art of war - and now that they’re out on their own, with no other advisers to rely on, Anakin values Rex’s opinion more than ever.

Rex hesitates for only a moment. “I think it would do the men some good to have a mission, sir. And if we could help some people while doing it...well, like Ahsoka said, isn’t that what we were made for?”

“Huh.” Anakin grunts as he sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed. He’s not used to being the voice of reason in this kind of situation. Either they’re even crazier than him, or he’s losing touch with the reckless streak that’s always given him an edge over more conservative jedi (in his opinion). “Looks like I’m outnumbered. Let’s find a target, then.”

\---------

Finding a target isn’t an issue. The moment Rex floats the idea past his officers and ARC troopers, Fives’ and Jesse’s eyes light up as bright as flares in the dead of night. In less than two days they have a list of possibilities as long as Ahsoka is tall, and narrowing the damn thing down becomes the problem.

“We’re trying to stay out of Hutt space, and most of the Mid Rim is a war zone right now…” Ahsoka swings her feet over the edge of the console she’s sitting on as she reads over their list once again. Rex has scratched out a dozen options for being too close to Republic bases of operation, while Anakin overruled a few suggestions on the basis that they’re connected to larger crime rings that might strike back at them. She tilts her head to the side and pulls her Master’s cast-off tunic, pooling in her lap and falling down past her knees, tighter around herself. “What about Onadax? It’s only a few jumps away.”

“It’s small-time,” Jesse replies, pulling up another screen with a rough outline of criminal operations on the planet. “But there’s a local...uh…”

“Let’s call it a trade guild,” Fives jumps in, catching the room’s attention with an overeager sweep of his hands. 

“Yeah, that’s a nice way of putting it. They do a side business in auctioning pleasure slaves to other planets in the Minos Cluster.”

“What they’re not mentioning is that we have no idea who their supplier is,” Echo interrupts.

“Shutting down their operation is a quick way to find out!” Fives replies sharply. It sounds like an argument they’ve had more than once already, and Ahsoka watches carefully as the muscles in Fives’ jaw jump and Echo’s eyes narrow, reading the tension in their body language as easily as a book after so long spent learning the individual habits of each trooper. Rex is right, the men need a mission or they’ll be at each other’s throats before long.

“Or to get ourselves blown out of the sky. You’re getting ahead of yourself, Fiv’ika.”

“And you’re too paranoid, vod.”

“Gentlemen!” Anakin thumps his robotic hand down on the durasteel table they’re gathered around. Almost all eyes snap back to him, the room falling silent immediately, though Echo and Fives are still glaring daggers at each other. Ahsoka would be more concerned if she didn’t know the batchmates will be inseparable again in ten minutes. She presses her lips together to hide a smirk as she continues to watch them out of the corner of her eye, dividing her attention between her master and her men. “Ahsoka’s right, it’ll only take us a couple of days to get to Onadax. And if the auction is as small time as it looks, I’m not too worried about their supplier coming after us. It’s as good a place as any to start.”

“You heard the General,” Rex says, clapping his gloved hands together sharply and ignoring Anakin’s grumble at the use of his former title. The men are having trouble adjusting to the idea of a life without the sharp divisions of rank - not that Ahsoka is doing much better.  _ Master _ comes to her lips as often as  _ Anakin _ or  _ Skyguy _ . As it turns out, freedom has a learning curve. “We’re setting a course for Onadax. That gives us just over thirty hours to come up with recon and infiltration strategies.”

Ahsoka nudges both Anakin and Rex with a thread of the Force - because nobody is around to chide her for frivolous uses of her gift these days - and bares her teeth in playful warning. “As long as none of them involve me posing as a slave this time.”


	5. Breaking In, Shaping Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The 501st finally has a real mission again, Fives has feels about slavery, poor Echo gets put in an awkward situation, and Ahsoka is never forgiving any of them for the outfit.

“I can’t  _ believe _ this.” Teeth bared in a snarl and eyes flashing dangerously, Ahsoka stares down the men assembled in front of her - and the gaudy, flimsy scraps of cloth on the table between them. “This is - this is - speciesist, misogynist, ass-backwards--”

“It’s not  _ our _ fault this planet is stuck in the past,” Anakin interjects when the clones utterly fail to defend themselves. Admittedly, the disguises Jesse and Fives had brought back from their initial recon leave something to be desired, but it isn’t like this is the worst - or even most embarrassing - thing that they have ever asked Ahsoka to do in the line of duty.

“It is your fault none of you could think of a better plan!” Somehow Ahsoka manages to make stripping off her tunic and leggings look vicious, aided by the fact that one of her boots impacts the wall beside Jesse’s hip when she kicks it off. Watching her strip to the skin and begin to shimmy and curse her way into the tight, sheer blue skirt drives home exactly how ridiculous the request is in the first place. His Snips is every inch the warrior, and dressing her as a pleasure slave doesn’t take the edge off of her in the slightest. Fives makes the mistake of chuckling at the sight of her half-dressed and glowering and Anakin winces, just waiting... “Next time, why doesn’t Fives pose as the slave and parade around weaponless and meek? Or is he not  _ exotic _ enough to play the part, hmm?” 

“‘Soka, you know none of us think--”

“Can it, Echo. And come help me with this kriffing zipper.”

\-------

“Do none of them realize I still have teeth?” Ahsoka asks mildly, after a man on the other side of the card table makes a particularly rude comment about her mouth. Echo’s fingers tighten briefly on her hip as he fights the urge to hurt someone for so much as looking at his Commander wrong. It’s not the first time tonight and it won’t be the last, and he’ll never live it down if he blows their cover to defend Ahsoka’s honor when she’s perfectly capable of doing so herself.

“Dunno,” Echo drawls from far too close to her montrals. “Want me to take ‘em out back and tell ‘em?” Of all his brothers, Echo’s scars make him the least recognizable as a clone, and so he was the obvious choice to play the role of Ahsoka’s owner. That doesn’t make it any less awkward or terrible to hold her on his lap while he plays drunk, telling ridiculously embellished lies about his years as a bounty hunter that the General is feeding to him through the comms. Every few hands of cards he makes sure to lose to keep from drawing too much attention to himself.

Ahsoka giggles brainlessly and shifts in his lap to tip her mouth close to his ear, close enough that her eyelashes drag against his cheek when she bats them. “If you beat up every sleemo in this bar we would never get off this planet,” she whispers. He only recognizes the flick of her fingers, disguised as a readjustment of the silver cuff on her wrist that connects to the decorative chain wound around his fingers, for what it is because he’s spent the last few years of his life watching Jedi tricks with fascination. The sleemo’s drink splashes over his cards and into his lap with a little help from the Force. General Skywalker snorts through the comms, and when Echo glances over to his position on the other side of the smoky cantina he can see both his General and his Captain stifling laughter in their corner booth.

“No, but it would be fun,” Echo replies with a shrug of his good shoulder. Just like the rest of his brothers, he’s aching for a real fight - this is the longest he’s ever gone without one in his short life. He would be happy to beat up a few of the local thugs for just about any reason. 

Despite how wrong it feels to let himself communicate any kind of tell to an enemy, his rough fingers are tapping out an aimless pattern where they rest on the bare skin between her sheer skirt and the strip of blue cloth that can only generously be called a top. It barely hides the vicious scar that Echo knows curves around the right side of her ribcage, among other things. One of the leaders of the trade guild they’re targeting is sitting across from Echo, grinning like a predator about to make a kill.  _ Subtle _ , he thinks. Mongrels are too damn easy. Deliberately losing, just like he meant to, he curses a blue streak in Mando’a as if it’s a surprise and pushes his credits across the table.

“I love taking offworlders for all their credits,” the guild leader, Ti’al, laughs as he piles up his winnings. “But perhaps you should quit before I win the clothes right off your back, soldier.”

“I don’t know.” Echo leans back, smirking in a way he learned from the General, and glances over at Ahsoka consideringly. His fingers stroke possessively over the bare strip of her belly, and he can see her resisting the urge to stomp on his foot. There are a few hundred of his vode aboard their ship that would kill to be in his position right now and none of them will ever understand how awful it is. Echo has known he was a glorified slave, worth only as much as the credits spent to create him and the enemies he can kill for the Republic, for as long as he can remember, but Ahsoka Tano isn’t a thing to be owned. The way she giggles and shifts in his lap enough to make the jewelry at her throat and wrists jingle leaves a bad taste in his mouth, even though she’s playing her part for the mission just like he plays his. Forcing his drunken smirk to remain in place, he raises a challenging eyebrow at Ti’al. “I’m thinking of going all or nothing. I won this pretty girl in a card game on Tatooine not so long ago, she’s my lucky charm. What d’you say - if I lose, she’s yours; if I win, I get an invitation to that little auction you’re holding tomorrow night.”

“And where did you hear about a thing like that?”

Echo shrugs and widens his smirk. “People say all kinds of things when there’s too much drink in ‘em, and I’ve got good ears. You didn’t answer me, friend. My girl against your invitation. You’ve got nothin’ to lose.”

Their target leans forward, studying Ahsoka with a glint in his eye that Echo doesn’t like at all. His grip on her tightens fractionally - the clones are nothing if not protective of their jetiise - until she kicks him lightly under the table to remind him to keep his cool. She’s doing an admirable job of seeming shocked and afraid to any onlookers, though acting isn’t her strong suit by any means.

“I’ve never owned a Togruta before. I bet she’s a wild one, hmm? Though she looks tame enough for now…” Ti’al strokes his patchy beard and considers her for a moment longer before nodding. “I’ll take your bet, soldier. And I’ll take your slave soon enough.”

“We’ll see,” Echo replies, inclining his head in acceptance. He promptly trounces Ti’al, with a little help from the card counting skills Ahsoka picked up from General Kenobi. When he walks out of the cantina his pockets are full of credits, Ahsoka is on his arm, and he’s holding a passkey to the warehouse where the slave auction will be staged tomorrow night. And Force, he can’t wait to personally punch the sneer off of Ti’al’s face after that bastard made an offer to buy Ahsoka even after he lost.

\-------

Dressed in a slightly more substantial wrap dress this time, Ahsoka trails after Echo into the warehouse, keeping her eyes on the floor like an obedient slave. The Force shows her more than most of the people milling around them can see with two - or four, in one case - good eyes anyway. A wall of fear thick enough to choke her waits for them in the next room, where they must be keeping the...merchandise. She feels a spike of anger that matches her own, letting her know that Anakin has drawn close enough to feel it, too. Her master is leading two companies of troopers to surround the sprawling facility, while more station themselves in the surrounding warehouse district to run interference, and every one of them is waiting tensely for Ahsoka’s signal. 

A tug draws her focus back to the room around her. “Fifty buyers,” Echo is mumbling into his comm, having found a position with a good vantage point of the barren room surrounding the podium. 

“Twice as many slaves, at least,” Ahsoka adds, using Echo to shield her from the rest of the room as she speaks. 

“Guards?” Rex’s voice asks through the comm positioned beneath her left lek. 

“A dozen in here,” Echo replies, closely followed by Ahsoka’s, “Ten with the slaves.”

“Four on the roof,” Anakin chimes in.

“And two at the gate,” Fives says. There’s a muffled grunt and two thuds before he speaks again. “Woops. Looks like I lied. Thanks, Jesse. Zero at the gate, we’re moving in.”

The auction has already started, human guards leading a pretty girl with iridescent green skin out onto the small stage. She can’t be any older than Ahsoka and she’s radiating fear as the guards parade her in front of their assembled buyers, nearly naked and shaking. Based on the intelligence the 501st has gathered in the past few days Ahsoka guesses that she’s new to slavery - Ti’al’s guild seems to specialize in selling off fresh blood to the kind of lowlifes that like to break their new possessions in themselves. The man himself is already on stage taking bids the old fashioned way. 

“The leader is mine,” Echo says decisively, in a way he never would have before being promoted to ARC Trooper.

“Only if you get there first, vod’ika,” Fives replies teasingly. “Permission to blow the back doors, Commander?”

Ahsoka surveys the room one more time, takes note of every person and weapon in the room, and projects an impression of the situation to Anakin before she replies. “Light it up, Fives.” 

The vibroblade carefully strapped to the inside of her thigh, out of sight under her skirt, is in Ahsoka’s hand a heartbeat before a small explosion rocks the building. As the human next to them curses in shock and reaches for his blaster, Ahsoka jabs the blade into the side of his neck and snatches his weapon as he crumples to the floor - slavers deserve even less mercy than most of the Seppies she’s cut down in the line of duty before. The decorative cuffs on her wrists snap with a thought, and Echo is already moving to block the entrance to the back room as a dozen of their brothers, led by Rex, burst through the front door. 

Everything promptly erupts in blaster fire and shouting.

Ahsoka keeps her head down and deflects blaster bolts away with the Force as easily as breathing as she follows Echo. Catching the way he’s keeping an eye on Ti’al in the chaos, she shakes her head. The clones are ruthless in their pursuit of anyone who gets on their bad side. “Go,” she says, sliding past him and into the back room. There’s only a second of hesitation before he jumps into the fray without so much as a backwards glance.

As soon as the door swings shut behind her Ahsoka is engulfed in the cloud of fear she sensed earlier. Women and men alike are huddled together in confusion, a handful of children shielded behind them, while a half-circle of the 501st surrounds them with their blasters holstered and their hands hanging empty at their sides. Ahsoka throws the lock on the door and darts to her Master’s side.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” Anakin is saying, his hands up beseechingly. Ahsoka can feel frustration radiating off of him and suspects it isn’t the first time he’s said as much. “Or to steal you. We’re here to free you.”

“I don’t believe you!” A woman calls out from the center of the crowd. “You look hardly better than the men who kidnapped my daughters and I!” 

Murmurs of agreement run through the crowd. They’re wasting  _ time _ , can’t they have this discussion later? Ahsoka opens her mouth to say as much, only to be cut off by Fives as he steps out of the circle, his hands raised in a copy of Anakin’s.

“Ma’am, believe me, if we intended to steal you I’d be pointing a blaster at the lot of you, not waiting around while the Gen -- while Skywalker argues with you. We’re very good at our jobs.” Fives takes another slow, steady step closer, stopping when a handful of the slaves flinch backward. “Right now, our job is to free you. We need your help with that.”

“And we need it  _ now _ ,” Ahsoka adds. “I promise, we’ll have time to explain on our ship, but we need to get you out of here before this little scuffle--” she jerks her head toward the locked door, and the sounds of the fight raging beyond, “draws too much attention. Or reinforcements.” Taking cautious steps forward she draws even with Fives, then passes him. To be fair to the people huddled against the wall, the clones and Anakin  _ do _ bear some resemblance to the scruffy looking human men that seem to run the auction operation. Maybe being small, feminine, and dressed in this ridiculous clothing will buy her some favor with them. “Please, let us help you. Our transports aren’t far away.”

The first speaker doesn’t budge, but a handful of younger men and women break from the crowd and run toward Ahsoka’s extended hand. Several of them are carrying wide-eyed, crying children, and when Fives catches a half-starved looking girl stumbling under the burden of a toddler and swings the child gently up into his arms more follow. Soon even the most distrustful have been pulled into the tide of bodies by their companions and are fleeing for the twisted hunk of metal that used to be the door leading outside. Ahsoka scoops up an unaccompanied child and passes her to Jesse in return for one of his blasters, then falls back to cover their exit.

“Alright, men,” Anakin calls from the front of the crowd. “Let’s move. Make sure nobody falls behind.”

And just like that, they’re off, ushering over a hundred humanoids through the dark streets of the warehouse district toward the loading bay where they stashed the shuttles. Sirens have already begun screaming somewhere in the settlement, and Ahsoka can hear airspeeders reaching top speed in the distance. “You’re about to have company,” Ahsoka warns the men still inside.

“Affirmative,” Rex replies. He isn’t even breathing heavily, though Ahsoka can still hear shots firing in the background. “We’re just cleaning up in here.” Ahsoka doesn’t bother asking what cleaning up means. She doesn’t imagine there will be many witnesses left for local law enforcement to take into custody.

\---------

“Why?” a shellshocked young man asks as their shuttle breaks free of the atmosphere. Onadax will soon be a muddy looking dot fading in their rear view, like so many other planets before it. “Why did you break us out? What’s in it for you?”

“Nothing,” Fives answers truthfully. This strike made them no money, gained them no allies. The people they saved are worth nothing in the grander scheme of the galaxy - but maybe that was the point. He looks down at the child still clinging to his shirtfront, and the girl slumped beside him with his jacket thrown across her for modesty, and shrugs. Rex or Ahsoka could probably give a better answer if they weren’t tied up with more important things like inventorying the injuries of their new charges. “We did it because we could. Because my brothers and I, we know what it’s like to be owned, and if we can use our freedom to keep others from being enslaved...do we need any other reason?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In bad news, I officially no longer have a laptop. I'm hoping that won't make my updates any more sporadic than they already are, but it might, cause sitting at a desktop writing at night after spending part of my day sitting at my desk at work is...not great.
> 
> In good news, the Skiratas will be coming in either in the next chapter or the one after that!


	6. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short filler in which Fives decides to do something very dumb, and in a fit of insanity everyone else goes along with it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As of, like, yesterday I officially have access to a laptop again. Hopefully that will last. But I don't have another full chapter yet, so I'm posting this short bit as a sign I haven't died or abandoned the fic. It is plot relevant, if not as fleshed out as I would like.

Sometimes Anakin is reminded just how  _ young _ his men are - they’re boys, really, years younger than Ahsoka despite the lines on their faces that make many of them look older than Anakin. Watching half of Torrent and Rancor Companies crowd around a mess hall table to listen to one of the slaves they freed tell a story is one of those times.

Echo is lucky enough to have claimed a bench seat - thanks to Fives glaring down a brother from Rancor Company until he made room - with Fives and Ahsoka sitting on the durasteel floor at his feet. The blue-skinned toddler who has been following Fives like a shadow since their rescue mission is between them, hugging her knees and staring with wide eyes up at the boy telling the tale. Many of the clones are wearing similar expressions, though Ahsoka appears to be dozing. 

It isn’t even a particularly interesting story. From what Anakin can hear from across the room, the boy - Jace? Jacob? Something like that - is simply reminiscing about his home planet before the war. Glass skyscrapers that reflected vibrant orange skies, lush indoor gardens, and pristine rivers running from mountain glaciers to a calm pink ocean. The kind of cities that the troopers have only ever seen in ruins. Anakin thinks bitterly of fighting in and out of the half destroyed towers on Christophsis before shaking himself back to the present. A present in which his men are listening intently to a story like the boys they are, and the tension of their...guests, is slowly draining from the Force as they realize that their rescuers really aren’t demanding anything in exchange. Even Rex seems relaxed - by his standards - as he sits next to Anakin and casually cleans one of the weapons he  _ liberated _ during their mission. 

Maybe Anakin should try relaxing, too. Force knows he can’t remember the last time he wasn’t wound tight with tension. Was it before they left the Order, before the war, before his mother died? Obi-wan would advise him to meditate on the matter and release his anxieties into the Force. Anakin gives that option serious consideration before abandoning it in favor of something that looks much more fun.

A minute later he’s seated on the floor next to Kix, eyes closed to better focus on the story now being told by an older Twi’lek girl. He can almost see the intricate cliff dwellings she describes in his mind’s eye… 

\---------

“Come on, ad’ika,” Fives pleads. One of his arms is stretched out along the bottom of a horizontal ventilation duct, reaching futilely for the toddler curled up just out of his reach. The moment the rest of the refugees had started disembarking she had bolted and Fives had been just a hair too slow to keep her from climbing into the ducts and scurrying out of reach. She hasn’t tried to go any farther than that, at least.

“The Captain is going to have you scrubbing freshers for a week if you can’t get her out of there, Fiv’ika.”

Fives curses a blue streak in response to Echo’s apparent amusement and tries once again to wedge his upper body into the duct opening. Once again, his shoulders refuse to let him, and this time the girl scoots further away just for good measure. “This would be a lot easier if you talked,” he grumbles. “But ‘Soka says you understand just fine. So you must know we’re home, right? Don’t you want to go home?”

“This isn’t home.” 

Pulling his head out of the vent so fast that he bangs it on the edge, Fives searches for the source of the voice. Echo was supposed to be watching his back, dammit, and he’d let someone sneak right up on Fives while he was vulnerable and… oh. Fives flushes slightly when he realizes he was startled by a slip of a Twi’lek girl who must be all of twelve standard. She’s still wearing the coat Fives threw over her during the rescue four days ago, though now it’s buttoned over a grey jumpsuit that hangs off of her thin frame.

“What d’you mean it isn’t home, Mira?” Echo asks while Fives is still grumbling and rubbing the back of his head. “The rest of the group said this is where you were all taken from.”

“That doesn’t make it home.” She crosses her arms, hands lost in the long sleeves of Fives’ jacket, and frowns down at the floor. Her Basic is halting and heavily accented when she finally speaks again. “Didn’t they tell you it’s a refugee camp? A slum? Maybe it’s home for them ‘cause they’ve got family, or something. But the two of us,” her leks twitch toward the dark vent, “we were in the orphanage.”

It makes sense. Republic refugee camps are foul, desperate places with few laws and fewer officials to enforce them, in Fives’ limited experience. Troopers can’t be spared to police them and locals don’t much care to take on the responsibility and expense. It’s the perfect place to kidnap orphans who have nobody to miss them, or poor children whose relatives can’t afford to pay anyone to find them. Fives grimaces. No wonder the kid doesn’t want to go back.

“I think she was there longer than me.” Mira shrugs one shoulder. “I’d be hiding, too, if I was small enough.”

Fives exchanges a glance with Echo, who catches on to exactly what he’s thinking before Fives has even finished the thought. “No,” he says, his eyes narrowing. “Don’t even think about it, Fiv’ika. It’s against regulations!”

“This isn’t the GAR, there are no regulations,” Fives points out mildly, but there’s a mischievous spark behind his golden eyes.

“But the regulations existed for a  _ reason _ . It’s stupid, and dangerous, and the Captain will never allow it.”

“Allow what?” Fives swallows hard, looking up at his ori’vod. Nobody as big as Rex should be that silent on his feet. How to sneak up and terrify your men must be something you learn in command training. “Shouldn’t you be helping Mira and the ad’ika disembark before they get left behind by the rest? We’re scheduled to lift off in two standard.”

“About that, sir…” Fives scrambles to his feet and stands with his hands clasped behind his straight back, trying to look properly respectful as he spits out a ridiculous, half-formed, stupid idea.

\--------

“You want to  _ what _ ?” Ahsoka demands, her voice going squeaky at the end. “You can’t be serious. Rex, they can’t be serious, right?”

Rex cocks his head left to communicate frowning without actually changing his expression - a habit developed from spending most of his life wearing a helmet. They all still do it. “Dead serious, Commander. Fives thinks we should let them stay. And… I do not, necessarily, disagree with him.”

“ _ What?” _

A high-pitched noise and pressure against his eardrums lets Anakin know that Ahsoka is probably saying something foul about the lot of them in her own language. From the way Fives and Echo shift in front of him, they know it too.

“I’ll admit, your reasons are compelling,” Anakin says. His metal fingers tap out an uneven rhythm against the table that would drive Obi-wan insane. So would this plan. But his Master isn’t here, and he is - he has to make the hard choices by himself now and live with the consequences. This one, at least, isn’t all that hard. “Slavery would probably have been kinder than an orphanage in a slum. If this is about justice, we can’t just abandon the people we rescue to a different life of suffering.”

“We also can’t raise children on a ship full of soldiers, Master!”

“No,” he admits. “But we can take care of them long enough to find a better place to leave them. Taking care of kids for a few weeks can’t be that hard, Snips. They don’t eat enough to impact our rations and we’ve got plenty of open beds. What could go wrong?”

“With our luck, sir?” Rex interjects before Ahsoka can object again. “Everything.”

“True. Let’s do it anyway. Tell the little anklebiter she can come out of the vents already.”

“Thank you, sir,” Fives says at the same time as Ahsoka throws her hands up and snaps, “Am I the only one with any sense left around here?”

“Seems like you are, little’un. Seems like you are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fives is, of course, the only one crazy enough to decide keeping a child is a good idea. He can't just let her something cute and helpless go suffer when there's something he can do about it! And Anakin's hero complex is totally okay with that. RESCUE ALL OF THE THINGS (PEOPLE)! The care and keeping of children can't be THAT hard, the little clones are basically self sufficient at that age!


	7. Shoulder to Shoulder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you fuzzytale for betaing this, as usual.
> 
> As some of you may have noticed, the tags have been updated and some new peeps are about to join our story :D

**_Mid Rim_ ** **, 60 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

As it turns out, caring for children requires a lot more than giving them hot food and a place to sleep, and doesn’t involve a whole lot of sleep for the caregivers themselves. Fives might have been engineered to function for days in battle with little to no sleep, but something about being kept awake by the pathetic wails of a child is worse than listening to bombs growing nearer by the minute. Possibly because it reminds him of sleeping three to a bunk in the barracks on Kamino, hands pressed over the mouth of a gasping, crying brother to muffle his sounds. Clones who displayed defects like  _ nightmares _ in front of the Kaminoans were quickly removed and reconditioned. Even in those days they had known that reconditioning meant a quick and brutal death, and they had all been desperate to save their brothers from it. Fives spent more nights than he cares to remember curled up on one side of Cutup while Echo or Hevy bracketed him on the other side, soothing his brother’s nightmares - and more than his fair share of nights being restrained and silenced for the sake of his life.

No one is going to recondition Anklebiter, though. It’s just that nobody is quite sure how to soothe her, either, even after three weeks of experimenting. Fives finds that walking worked best, and he knows every inch of the ship as well as his blaster after three weeks of walking almost nightly circles around it. Tonight they’re pacing the bridge, with Fives nominally monitoring the comms while Echo keeps one eye on the navicomputer and the other on a holobook about child-rearing. The toddler has quieted to hiccuping little sobs by the time Echo speaks up.

“This one says that human and near human children find it soothing to be read to.  _ And _ it’s good for their social and intellectual development.”

“Nobody ever read to us,” Fives points out, adjusting his grip on Anklebiter when she squirms.

“Exactly,” Echo huffs. “And look how well we turned out.”

“True. What are we supposed to read to her?”

“Doesn’t say. Do you know any stories?” Fives opens his mouth only for Echo to quickly cut him off again. “On second thought, don’t tell her any of your stories. She’ll be scarred for life. Give her here.”

Fives is more than happy to pass her off to his vod in exchange for Echo’s position at the navicomputer, even if he does look over his shoulder every few seconds to check on the status of her sniffling sobs. Echo has her tucked against his good side, her head on his shoulder, and he appears to be...reciting regulations to her? More shockingly, it appears to be working. Her head is nodding, her little arms going limp around Echo’s neck, and before too long she falls asleep to the sound of regulations on the upkeep of GAR issued weaponry.

“I don’t know if that worked or if you just bored her to sleep, vod’ika,” Fives says, smiling up at Echo in exhausted gratitude. 

“Shut it, Fives, and just be glad I’m helping you at all. It was your di’kutla idea to keep her, I should just let you suffer.”

Fives doesn’t bother replying, just lets his smile grow instead. For all of his bitching and moaning, he’s seen the way that the pained lines around Echo’s eyes and mouth soften when Anklebiter dozes off against his chest or Mira sits close enough to brush shoulders with him during a meal. Echo is just as wound around the girls’ small fingers as the rest of their crew - even Ahsoka, who hasn’t quite forgiven any of them for outvoting her on the issue of keeping the children yet.

Of course, five minutes after the kid falls asleep the comm terminal starts beeping.

\---------

Anakin stumbles onto the bridge still in his wrinkled sleeping tunic with Ahsoka on his heels and Rex bringing up the rear. His hair is a mess of curls, Ahsoka has the lines of a pillow imprinted on the left side of her face, and Rex’s jaw is set in that way that means he hasn’t had caf yet, and yet every one of them is ready to jump into battle or manage a crisis. You don’t survive almost three years of constant war if you can’t be awake and ready to fight in five seconds or less, after all.

“What’s going on?” Anakin demands, every inch General Skywalker for a moment. When Fives and Echo snap to attention - as best as Echo can, with a wide-eyed toddler braced on his hip - he regrets it for the half-second before Fives activates the comm terminal.

Everything else becomes irrelevant the moment Obi-wan’s face flickers to life on the screen’s terminal. The timestamp in the corner indicates that it’s a recording, not a live message, yet Anakin has to bite back a murmur of  _ Master _ despite himself. Ahsoka has gone rigid at his side, her Force presence tumultuous. He can’t rip his eyes away from the screen long enough to get a read on her expression, but he’s sure she must look just as shocked as he feels. Since they left the Temple they’ve had no communication with the Jedi, the GAR, or even Anakin’s beloved Master. Anakin himself has gone to great pains to make sure that their ship is untrackable, yet somehow…

“Anakin, you must listen to me very carefully, and you must  _ not _ try to contact me in return. The Council cannot know that we have been in contact. The Grand Army is incensed because you have stolen Republic property by taking the 501st with you, the Senate is in an uproar over losing its most popular hero, and the Council…” Obi-wan pinches the bridge of his nose, a sure sign that his head is pounding and he is running on too little sleep. Anakin’s heart clenches in worry. Who is there to watch Obi-wan’s back, if not him? Surely Cody is looking after him, yet his Master still appears to have aged years in only a few months. “Officially, I cannot condone your actions. But do not ever doubt that I am proud of you, my padawan. You are walking the path of a true Jedi. And I know that you, more than anyone, have our troops’ best interests at heart. That is my true reason for contacting you. Several squads of the two-twelve have gone missing in action on the rimward edge of the Chommell Sector. You will find them in a medical shuttle. I trust that you will do your best to assist them. With them are some...well, I would not call them friends, but they may be allies to your cause.” The corner of Obi-wan’s mouth turns up in his characteristic sad, gentle smile as his gaze flickers off camera. “I must go now. May the Force be with you, Anakin.”

Anakin’s bare fingers brush the screen a mere moment after Obi-wan’s face blinks out of existence, replaced by a set of coordinates and what appears to be a ship’s identification number. “And with you, too, Master,” he murmurs to empty air. He has no way of knowing how long ago that transmission was sent, and no time to waste following Obi-wan’s instructions, but he hesitates over the screen for a moment longer as he reaches out into the Force. As with every time he has tried before, Anakin is met with silence. Obi-wan has shuttered his end of the training bond.

A cool hand resting over his draws Anakin back to the present. Ahsoka is looking up at him, a lifetime’s worth of sadness and loss in her eyes contrasting with a hopeful smile. Anakin straightens up and pulls his hand away, resting it on Ahsoka’s shoulder instead as if to draw on her strength for stability. Their training bond, at least, is a warm pulse always at the edge of his consciousness. 

Without even being asked, Rex crosses to the navicomputer and personally enters the coordinates, selecting the fastest course to their new destination. The target that they have already selected and begun to plan their attack on will have to wait - there are brothers relying on them.

\-----

“--I am proud of you, my padawan.” Anakin thumbs the controls and the video jumps backward once more. “Do not ever doubt that I am proud of you, my padawan. You are walking the path of a true Jedi.” Again. “--proud of you, my padawan.” Again. Again. Again.

Obi-wan’s smooth Coruscanti accent has been the soundtrack to over half of Anakin’s life.  _ Release your emotions into the Force _ ,  _ Anakin _ when his anger burned too bright and  _ we must remember that the Jedi are peacekeepers, not warriors, my padawan _ when his first instinct was to fight his way out of a situation and  _ go to sleep, Anakin, I am here _ when he was a frightened youngling crawling into his Master’s bed for comfort. Anakin rewinds the video once more, closes his eyes and listens, and allows himself to picture what Obi-wan had looked like before the war trampled upon the values of the Order he held dear and turned him from a negotiator into a warrior. Once, Anakin had seen his Master as the perfect Jedi. Infuriating and emotionally removed and perpetually disappointed in him. He had been so wrong.

“I am proud of you, my padawan.”

“Sir--” Anakin sits up with a start, his metal hand slamming the stop button. Only one trooper is actually capable of sneaking up on him…

Rex is standing in the doorway, a dark shadow in the dim light of the ship’s night-cycle. Somehow his Captain has learned to quiet his presence in the Force over the past few years in a way that Anakin didn’t know was possible for a non-Force sensitive. Others can develop shielding against basic intrusions, but Rex...Rex is an anomaly, though perhaps only because he has spent so much time around Jedi in a war zone that he has learned to disappear in the chaos to maintain his privacy.

“Sir.” Rex frowns, carefully pronouncing the next words as if it pains him to call his former General by his first name in a public space no matter how often he’s used it in private over the past several years, “Anakin, we’re five hours from the rendezvous point. You should sleep while you can.”

“So should you, Rex,” Anakin points out, eyes narrowing. “But you won’t, even if I order you to.”

“No, I suppose I won’t.” The corner of Rex’s mouth twitches up and his head tilts the slightest bit right - as much of a smile as anyone but Ahsoka can get out of Rex most days. His eyes flick between Anakin and the image of Obi-wan’s face frozen on the screen, mouth open awkwardly mid-word, and he seems to be making some kind of calculation. A moment later he drops down into the seat next to Anakin and kicks his feet up on the control console too, close enough that their boots are brushing. “Might as well stay up together.”

Anakin frowns and considers telling him to leave. This is a private moment. Instead he sighs heavily and settles more comfortably in his seat, nudging Rex’s feet over so that he can stretch out.

Rex is the one who reaches out to press play, flooding the bridge with the warmth of Obi-wan’s voice. Anakin uses the Force to restart the video when it ends and Rex doesn’t so much as twitch, let alone seem to judge him, even when he does it again.

The two of them sit like that through the long night-cycle, hyperspace streaming by outside the view screens and Obi-wan’s comforting voice lulling them both into a meditative daze, side by side and prepared to confront whatever surprise may be awaiting them together.

\-------

The bridge is hushed when they drop out of hyperspace, filled only with the breath of too many beings crowded into the small space, their eyes fixed on the viewscreen as if they have any chance of making out one small ship against the vast blackness of space. Rex understands their fascination with the mystery of Kenobi’s message and so he hasn’t cleared them out yet. Even more troopers are packed into the hall outside or waiting in the mess halls for word of what they find. Any possible connection to the GAR, to the brothers still fighting for the Republic and the lives they knowingly left behind, has everyone on board thrumming with energy.

Rex isn’t immune, and the moment the sensors beep his head snaps around and his eyes lock on the screen. On one side of the display indecipherable numbers and letters are streaming faster than Rex can keep up with them from a distance, and on the other is a magnified image of a small ship hanging idly in the shadow of an asteroid. 

“It matches the ident General Kenobi sent us, Sir,” says the brother, Radar, at the sensor controls. “It appears to be a GAR medical transport, which means limited weapons capabilities, and they’re hailing us. Audio and video.”

“Route it through the main comm console,” Anakin instructs, stepping up to the holoterminal at the center of the room. Rex can  _ feel _ the energy of his brothers’ collective attention at his back as he steps into position at Anakin’s left shoulder, Ahsoka falling in on Anakin’s right. They present a united front to the unknown, as they have for years and as they will no matter what happens. “This is Anakin Skywalker of the Cin Vhetin. Who am I speaking to?”

The holoterminal flickers, sound filtering through before the image can solidify. “Hell of a name you chose there, boy,” growls a voice that Rex recognizes deep in his gut. Moments later the holo resolves into a short, grizzled man, flanked on either side by clone troopers in full armor. A cold feeling curls around Rex’s heart, and he can feel his face settling even more firmly into the stern mask of command. Like many of his brothers in the regular infantry - especially the command clones - Rex has no fondness for the Mandalorian mercenaries brought in to train the clone commandos. His RC brothers might practically worship the men who raised and trained them, but all Rex sees when he looks at Kal Skirata is the face of a man who stood by and watched his brothers tormented at the hands of their Kaminoan creators in exchange for a fortune. The fact that he has stayed to fight beside his Null sons in the war does nothing to change that.

“Sergeant Skirata,” Anakin replies, voice gone cold and hard. The flickering muscle in his jaw tells Rex exactly how much he appreciated being called  _ boy _ by a man who makes no attempt to disguise his dislike of jetiise. “You’re not the  _ last _ person I expected my Master to send to me, but you’re close.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Kal and Omega and the Null boys but, uh, this fic is not going to be the kindest to them because Rex, Anakin and the 501st do NOT. So keep that in mind as we go forward.


	8. Beast Inside

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize it's been almost two months since I updated. I'm the worst, but I promise this fic isn't abandoned, life just got a little crazy on me.
> 
> Title from Demons by Imagine Dragons, which is my poor bb Jedi theme song.

**_Mid Rim_ ** **, 61 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

Fives tugs hard on the straps of Ahsoka’s low profile body armor, making sure that it fits snugly at her waist and shoulders and is in no danger of sliding to expose any vital organs. His own protective vest and gauntlets are already securely in place under his clothes, and Rex is performing a similar check on Anakin before allowing him to pull his overtunic on. “You’re set,” Fives finally says, clapping Ahsoka on the shoulder with one hand and offering her tunic back to her with the other. It’s blue, like his shirt, and not for the first time he notices that they’ve all gravitated to the closest thing to a uniform that they can make out of civvies. Black pants - or leggings, in Ahsoka’s case - and varying shades of blue shirts or tunics. 

“Why are we going armed and armored to meet allies?” Ahsoka asks as she fastens her belt and checks the blaster at her hip. “Master Kenobi obviously trusted them enough.”

“Trust is putting it nicely,” Anakin replies as he does the same.

“Kal Skirata and the clones he trained are...unpredictable,” Rex adds.

“Also putting it nicely,” Fives butts in. He pats the blaster strapped to his thigh and checks that each of the vibroblades hidden in his clothing are secure, then adjusts his blue kama, the only part of their GAR issued gear that the ARCs and command clones stole when they deserted. “Echo and I trained with a couple of the Null ARCs after we were promoted. They’re kriffing insane, and they’re Skirata’s attack dogs. Never turn your back on a Null.”

“They’re smug bastards, too. Think they’re better than the rest of us infantrymen because they came off the line first.” Rex scowls. He was in the first batch of regular troopers to be decanted if Fives has done his math right. “But they’ve never fought in the trenches with the likes of us. They don’t know what the front lines do to a man.”

Ahsoka’s mouth twists into a grim line that Fives thinks doesn’t suit her at all. “This should be fun, then.”

“Don’t forget,” Echo finally speaks up, moving to take his position at Ahsoka’s right shoulder. “Sergeant Skirata is a real Mando - he has no love for the Jetiise.”

Ahsoka blows out a deep breath and squares her shoulders. She’s at least six inches taller than when Fives was first assigned to the 501st, and the baby fat has melted off of her cheeks and body, leaving her whipcord thin and made up of nothing but muscle. Though she doesn’t look anything like the girls from the holovids, Fives knows that most of his brothers agree with his assessment that she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.  More importantly, she’s grown into the best Commander he could ask to serve under. He would follow her into the Sith tombs on Korriban if only she asked, and he takes up his place at her left shoulder with pride.

“Great. Let’s go make friends, boys.”

\--------

Standing one step behind Ahsoka’s left shoulder gives Fives a view of three quarters of the hangar bay. He still misses his bucket, but at least a half dozen of his brothers are at his back, all lightly armed and restless as they wait for their new guests to disembark.

A handful of men in 212th yellow come down the ramp first, several of them limping or leaning on each other and one born on a stretcher between the least wounded of his brothers. Rex and Kix step forward in the same breath, Kix to speak quietly with the men carrying the stretcher and Rex to intercept the man wearing a Sergeant’s ID. “Welcome to the Cin Vhetin, vod. Report?”

“Sergeant Jump, sir, reporting for duty. General Kenobi detached us from the 212 after our last engagement to keep my brothers from being reconditioned for their injuries, sir, physical and mental. He said you and General Skywalker may be able to help.”

“General Kenobi was right to send you, Sergeant,” Skywalker says. He’s a good General, a good man, and if any jetii is going to protect his brothers Fives knows it’s him. “Kix will get you fixed up and we’ll debrief fully later.”

Jump understands a dismissal when he hears one. He salutes sharply to Rex and Skywalker before turning on his heel to help Kix herd his men out of the hangar. It’s as they’re leaving that the 501st’s less welcome guests disembark. Skirata is shorter than Fives thought he would be, or maybe it’s just that he’s dwarfed by the clones on either side of him. Fives is taller than most of his batchmates, but the Nulls are taller still. About Rex’s height, actually.

“Welcome aboard,” Rex says, his expression less a smile than a baring of teeth. Fives shifts to make it clear that he’s guarding his ori’vod’s back, catching sight of Echo doing the same to Ahsoka out of the corner of his eye. “I trust you won’t be staying long.”

“So eager to get rid of us, vod’ika? Where are your manners?”

Fives thinks that’s Jaing speaking, but he doesn’t know the Nulls well enough to tell for sure. It’s only when they take their helmets off that he can identify the other Null as Ordo, and the Katarn armor of the squad behind them must mean commandos. Skirata certainly made sure to come ready for a fight. That doesn’t keep Fives from bristling at the fact that they dared call his Captain little brother. Rex is no one’s  _ little _ brother.

“We’re here as friends, boys,” Skirata says, not helping Fives’ temper any. “Ordo here has been keeping an eye on you since you deserted. We’ve got a proposal for you. Is there somewhere more comfortable we can talk?”

Anakin finally steps forward, offering Skirata his mechanical hand to shake. “Sergeant.” He nods sharply, stiff and formal in a way Fives hasn’t seen since they left the GAR. It raises his hackles. “Follow me to the mess.”

The halls are full of brothers who don’t even pretend not to size up their visitors, who have all at least taken off their buckets. Skirata is walking at Skywalker’s side, and Ordo has taken position next to Rex with Jaing flanking him on the other side, running his mouth. “Long time no see, vods. You don’t write, you don’t comm. You abandon your brothers to fight on without you. It’s rude.”

Fives snarls, barely keeping his temper in check at their continued disrespect. Ahsoka has already caught Echo by the sleeve in what is doubtless an attempt to restrain his unpredictable temper, but is trusting Fives to control himself. Perhaps wrongly.

“I did what I had to do to protect my men.” Rex’s voice is as cold and hard as durasteel, his posture perfect, his right hand resting idly on the blaster holstered at his hip. “I don’t expect those who haven’t commanded troops every day on the front lines to understand.”

“I’d watch your tongue, little brother,” Ordo warns, his hand dropping to rest on his blaster. “We’re as loyal to our brothers as anyone.” His deep voice lowers, slow and deliberate. “More loyal than  _ some. _ ”

That’s it. Ahsoka doesn’t even try to reach for Fives as he leaps forward, seizing Ordo by his pauldrons and slamming him into the nearest wall. His fist follows a moment later, catching Ordo in the nose while he’s still reeling from surprise. “Then why do you call a man who has put our brothers down like dogs your  _ buir _ ,” he snarls, raising his fist again. He’d punch Kal Skirata himself if he thought he could get away with it.

\-------

After a moment of confusion in which Fives and Ordo scuffle for the upper hand while everyone around them watches, Jaing jumps into action. His left hand has barely closed on Fives’ shoulder before Ahsoka is there, hands raised palm-out, throwing him backward with a blast of the Force that sends shockwaves down the hall. Like  _ hell _ she’ll let these strange troopers gang up on one of her boys, regardless of who started the fight. Ordo had it coming as far as Ahsoka is concerned.

Jaing picks himself up from the floor with a shake, and two years ago Ahsoka would have been naive enough to believe the stunned look in his eyes and the way he staggers to his feet and completely missed the blade dropping into his hand. She isn’t that innocent little girl anymore, though, and she catches the vibroblade in one gauntleted hand and throws it back to embed in the blaster-scarred wall beside his left ear, following it with another push of the Force to pin him there. Another fight has broken out behind her - the lightly armored squad of 501st that had accompanied them clashing noisily with Commandos in Katarn armor - but she ignores it. Her brothers have her back and her duty is to neutralize this Null, who is watching her with murder in eyes so cold they make her stomach twist in knots. If Rex, Fives and Echo are right - and they nearly always are - he’s more dangerous than all of the Commandos combined.

“It’s just like a jetiise to be too hut’uunla to fight like a warrior,” Jaing spits, fingers twitching like he wants to reach for his blaster. 

Ahsoka tightens her invisible grip on him and gives a shake for good measure, her lips pulling back from sharp teeth in a feral snarl. “A warrior uses every weapon and advantage at their disposal,” she says, remembering the endless drills Rex had subjected her to when she first joined the 501st, until she was able to pick out every potential weapon in any scenario he presented her with. “If you could stop a man’s heart with a thought,” she narrows her eyes and increases the pressure on his armored chest, “would you hesitate, if it would keep your brothers safe?”

“Ahsoka!”

For a moment she ignores her Master, listening only to the blood rushing in her montrals as the Nulls’ face begins to pale from lack of oxygen. She has all of the power in this situation and suddenly the wall she had built around the dark pit of rage in her chest buckles. Months of anger at the Order that dehumanized her brothers and abandoned her to die floods her veins, worse for being left to fester, and the world darkens at the edges. She is no longer a jedi. She could spare her brothers so much trouble by simply eliminating the threat in front of her…

“ _ Ahsoka!” _ Anakin’s flesh hand jerks her backwards, breaking her single-minded focus and snapping her back to a suddenly silent reality. Loosening but not releasing her grip on Jaing, she lets Anakin’s next tug spin her to face her Master, whose barely controlled anger is sparking in his eyes and radiating into the Force around them, doing nothing to help calm her. Looking past him, she can see why.

Ordo has Fives pinned to the wall, blaster pressed to the underside of his bruised and swollen jaw. Both of them are pouring blood from their noses, their mouths, their split brows, and still snarling at each other between red-stained teeth, while Rex stands in the middle of the hall with his own blaster leveled at the back of Ordo’s head and the flat expression on his face that means he’s barely restraining his own temper. One of the commandos has Jesse pinned to the floor while Echo keeps another in a chokehold. And Kal Skirata is standing in the middle of it, completely unruffled, restraining Fives’ Anklebiter from running to her caretaker. 

It only takes one look at the tears welling in her eyes to replace the fire in Ahsoka’s veins with ice. She nearly killed a man in cold blood, in front of a  _ child _ \- maybe the Order was right to cast her out, in a roundabout way. 

Whatever she has become, it’s certainly not the jedi she imagined as a child in the creche.

\-------------

“Boys,” Skirata says, extending his free hand palm up in a gesture of peace, his many weapons untouched. “Put your weapons away. You’ve had your fun, but we have business to do, and I’m in no mood for cleaning up bodies.”

“You let her go or I’ll kill every Sith-damned one of you,” Fives growls, spitting a mouthful of blood at Ordo as if he isn’t completely at the other man’s mercy. It earns him a smack across the face with the butt of Ordo’s blaster before he holsters it and releases Fives, who has to bite back an insult about how quick Ordo is to obey his buir. Behind him, Rex is slower to lower his weapon, only dropping it to his side once Fives nods to indicate that he’s alright. A little concussion never did a vod much harm, after all. He probably won’t even need Kix to fix him up, if Echo hasn’t damaged his hands too much in the fight to throw a few stitches into the bleeding gash on Fives’ forehead.

Skirata, in turn, releases the toddler in his grip, and Fives has less than a second to regain his feet before a blur of blue skin and tangled black hair hits him in the chest. By now closing his arms around her is almost as natural as drawing a blaster, even when her knee digs into his bruised hip as she tries to climb higher, her tiny hands reaching for his face. Fives grits his teeth and refuses to flinch when she touches his split lip and blackened eye, wailing when her hands come away red with blood.

“Don’t cry, ad’ika,” he says, smiling despite the trickle of blood it spills down his chin. From the corner of his eye he watches as Echo releases the commando in his grip and the rest of their vode disengage, slowly separating themselves into distinct groups - the 501st cluster around their jetiise, and Fives doesn’t miss the way his brothers form a wall between him and the Skiratas, or the fact that Anakin herds Ahsoka behind himself. “A few bruises never hurt anyone, Biter, see, I’m just fine. Gave as good as I got.”

It’s a lie and, kriff, he misses his armor more now than ever before. A warrior may be more than his armor, but he has three cracked ribs and Ordo is doubtless only hurting in the few places Fives was able to exploit weak spots in the Katarn. Shifting the sniffling toddler onto his hip, he glares over her head at the tight knot of unwelcome guests blocking their hallway, stubbornly blinking blood out of his eyes.

“Then let’s do business,” Skywalker says - and he  _ sounds _ calm, even detached, like a perfect Jedi, but Fives knows better. After serving under the General for three years he recognizes the way that Anakin’s metal hand flexes around a lightsaber that isn’t there. “Rex, with me. Bring one of your  _ sons _ ,” he almost spits the word, “and we’ll talk. As long as the rest of them can behave themselves.”

“But Master--” 

“I’ll keep you updated, Ahsoka. I won’t make any decisions without everyone’s input.”

\---------

Like her Master, Ahsoka has always preferred the moving forms of meditation. Sitting still makes her skin itch when there is something on her mind - and there is  _ so much _ on her mind. Alone in a storage bay they have converted into a training room she can sink into the Force, closing her eyes and feeling it swell in her beating heart, following its path as it flows through her limbs and powers each step, each stretch, each jump, and breathing it in again before her next movement. Peace follows gradually after the awareness. She lets first her pain, then her anger bleed away - it will flood back in later, but for now she trusts in the Force to guide her path. Bit by bit she surrenders the durasteel control she has fought to keep on her emotions since she left the Temple.

For once, she even shuts the noise and energy of a thousand other beings in close quarters out of her mind. She cuts herself off from the distraction that her brothers provide - the anger spreading through their ranks as word of the fight with the Skiratas gets around will only add unnecessary fuel to her own.

She is alone. One soul in a dark, cold galaxy, lit sparsely by stars and threads of the Force. When she was young it had felt calm, inviting, full of promise. Now...now it echoes with lives lost and the aftershocks of a thousand battles. Now she knows that the Order of her childhood cannot, will not, protect her. Instead they have abandoned her.

The world rushes back in between one movement and the next. Ahsoka stumbles, gasping, and lets her momentum take her to the floor. More than sweat wets her cheeks, and she swipes at them pointlessly. Another flood of tears replaces them a moment later.

“There is no emotion,” she recites, knowing it for a lie even as she clings to the familiar teaching. “There is the Force. There is no - is no - is no emotion.” Her voice cracks. “There  _ is no emotion _ , there is the Force.”

So caught up in her own turmoil, Ahsoka doesn’t notice another presence in the room until Anakin sinks to the floor beside her. When he stretches out his arm she ducks under it, tucking herself against his side. “There  _ is _ emotion,” he corrects. “And there is also the Force. Or at least, that’s what Obi-wan used to tell me when I was a kid.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ahsoka sniffs without looking up.

Anakin’s chuckle in response is gentle, almost kind. He feels far more at peace than he was when they parted ways two hours ago. “Y’know, he wasn’t the perfect Jedi he pretended to be. Especially not my first few years as a padawan. He taught me some stuff that the Council would call heresy, and that’s part of it.” Rough, grease stained fingers nudge Ahsoka’s chin up until she has to meet his eyes. “There is emotion  _ and _ there is the Force, Snips. The path to the dark side is in letting our emotions control us. I know I’m not always great at that, but I’m trying. Every day.”

“Do or do not,” Ahsoka jokes weakly. Even as a crecheling under Yoda’s tutelage, she had never quite understood his logic. The memory of learning at his feet has her blinking back another wave of tears. How could the smiling troll of her youth stand silently by while Tarkin pushed for her death? “I’m just so angry, Master. I almost killed that man for nothing more than trying to defend his brother - and I wasn’t even really mad at him. The Jedi way is to forgive, to make peace, but they were going to let me  _ die _ . They knew I didn’t do it and they were still going to--” Her words die with a choked sob and she buries her face in his rough blue tunic. 

\-------

Anakin has never done well with crying. His experience is limited, mostly consisting of his own tears over missing and then losing his mother, and the rare occasions that Padme had cried in front of him - often out of frustration as their relationship fell to pieces despite their best efforts. Usually the only tears aboard ship are shed silently during the Hour of Remembrance. This is different. He makes vague shushing noises as Ahsoka sobs into his shoulder, finding it hard to be reassuring when anger is flaring hot in his own chest. The Council did this, and he wants them to pay - but he  _ needs _ to take care of his padawan and their men far more than he needs revenge.

“I know, Ahsoka,” he repeats over and over again against her montrals. “I know. We aren’t jedi anymore. Cry it out.”

She clings to him, crying until his knees are aching from sitting cross legged and his tunic is soaked. And if there are wet, salty tracks on Anakin’s cheeks when she pulls back, neither of them mention it. They don’t need to. For just a second, they have found peace in the midst of their seething emotions, if only by wearing themselves out.

“What kind of business does Skirata want to do?” Ahsoka asks after a long pause. She’s still sniffling every so often, but the tear tracks on her face have dried. Anakin reaches out to clean the last one off with the sleeve of his tunic, much like Obi-wan had done for a scared little boy from Tatooine long ago on Naboo. 

“He says he’s been trying to find a cure for our vode’s aging, and he wants our help. Rex has a bad feeling about it, but I don’t think Skirata’s lying…” Anakin shrugs and runs his flesh hand through his hair. Without Obi-wan around to tug teasingly on his curls when they grow too wild he has gone far too long without a cut. Kriff it all, he wishes his old Master was here with them now. “Doesn’t matter right now. We’re not making any decisions without the input of the men. And we can’t get that until they’ve finished betting on the outcome of Fives and Ordo’s rematch.”

“Their  _ what _ ?!”


	9. Pride and Freedom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fives picks another fight, Rex does _not_ like Kal Skirata, and the 501st learns that freedom sometimes means saying goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, um, I'm the worst and I hope I haven't lost too many readers as a result of not posting for so long. I still don't have my own laptop, and I also have a partner who lives two hours away at the moment and driving there and back takes up a lot of my weekends lately. 
> 
> But no more excuses - the next chapter will be up next Saturday night even if it kills me.
> 
> And thank you, as always, to fuzzytale for betaing this for me.

**_Cin Vhetin, Mid Rim_ ** **, 61 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

Echo is cursing under his breath when Ahsoka settles on the floor next to him, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap. She looks downright peaceful - at least to someone who doesn’t know her. Echo can feel the tension radiating off of her in waves, creating a feedback loop of sorts with his own nervous energy. 

“I can’t leave you two alone for a minute,” Ahsoka grumbles good naturedly, swaying to bump Echo’s shoulder with her own. These days they’re almost on a level. “One day you’re adopting, the next you’re letting Fiv’ika pick a fight with what you seem to think is one of the most dangerous men in the galaxy.”

Echo hums his agreement, only to be interrupted when Rex drops down on Ahsoka’s other side, his brow wrinkled but his eyes sparking with interest. “Our vod isn’t exactly a helpless kitten, ‘So’ika. And he thinks he has something to prove.”

Without taking his eyes off of the makeshift sparring ring the 501st set up weeks ago in an unused storage bay, Echo snorts. “How much did you bet on him winning?” 

“Nothing,” Rex lies smoothly. Like Echo, his eyes are fixed on the center of the room and the two men finishing their pre-match rituals. Both are stripped to the waist, and Ordo is pacing restlessly down one side of the ring in nothing but the bottom half of his blacks, reminding Echo of the huge reptilian predators that ate one of his brothers on an almost-forgotten moon. Fives is standing almost perfectly still across from him and carefully stretching his bruised left shoulder. He’s exaggerating the damage for the sake of his opponent’s assessing gaze, but Echo knows it’s hurting him. Just like the cracked ribs and the split knuckles and every other minor wound Ordo inflicted during their short fight earlier.

When Fives settles into a loose fighting stance at the center of the ring Echo feels Ahsoka freeze beside him, leaning ever so slightly forward. Echo’s breathing syncs with Fives’ for a handful of seconds as he tries to steady himself - in, expanding their chests under their matching tattoos of Rex’s handprint, and out, relaxing shoulders permanently inked with their Commander’s winged face markings just like the rest of Torrent company. A clone’s life can be measured by their tattoos - the rotary blaster on Fives’ shoulder to commemorate their dead batchmates, 501 stamped over Rex’s heart, Ahsoka’s distinctive markings embossed somewhere on each of the men who have served under her. The fact that Ordo has no visible tattoos is almost as unsettling to Echo as the way he steps slowly toward Fives.

Then, between one breath and the next, Ordo slams into Fives with the sick smack of flesh on flesh. The rest of the room goes silent.

\----------

Nearly every inch of Fives hurts, but that’s nothing new.  A soldier’s life is pain, according to Bric - one of the many bits of wisdom he beat into Domino squad - and he wasn’t wrong. Fives and his brothers have been in one kind of pain or another since the day they were decanted.

Gritting his teeth, he spins so that Ordo clips him rather than hitting him squarely and taking him to the ground, and turns to keep the other clone in his sight. The fastest way to lose this fight is to let Ordo take him by surprise. His vod is bigger, taller, and perhaps marginally faster, but he’s fighting for his pride rather than his family, and in that, and in the fact that the Nulls have a reputation for acting like they’re superior to their CT brothers in every way, Fives has the upper hand. He hits Ordo before he’s quite regained his footing, and follows it up with a knee to the ribs that encounters flesh rather than armor this time. 

Ordo manages to disengage before the next blow lands, dancing back out of reach. For half a second Fives thinks he sees shock in Ordo’s eyes.  _ Good _ . Settling back into a fighting stance, Fives waits, and before long Ordo charges again. Unarmored and unarmed they’re a far closer match than they were in the hallway, trading blows desperately, as if this is one of the fight clubs some of their trainers were notorious for forcing their squads to participate in. For the most part Fives remains on the defensive, darting out of Ordo’s reach and dodging his blows, slipping out of grappling holds and using Ordo’s momentum against him whenever he can, only landing his own hits when there’s an obvious opening. 

Ten minutes pass, according to Fives’ internal clock, and he’s panting through scabbed lips and blinking blood out of his eyes. His ribs are screaming in pain - but so are Ordo’s, if the way he’s keeping his left arm tucked close to his side isn’t a diversion. The way he’s favoring his right knee certainly isn’t - the whole room heard that pop when Fives kicked him. And finally, finally, Fives sees his opening as Ordo stumbles on his bad leg. The next time he kicks out he can  _ feel _ something tear.

They go to the ground hard, cursing in Mando’a and grappling for the upper hand. Fives isn’t sure whose blood is making his knees slip on the mat as he struggles desperately to keep Ordo from flipping them and using his size against him. Something cracks, and Fives isn’t sure whose bone that was either. The world has narrowed down to one thing and one thing only - winning, for his ori’vod and his jetiise and his...not his legion, not anymore. They’ve left that life behind. Perhaps for his clan. Yes.  _ Winning for his clan. _

The blood pouring from Ordo’s brow and down his cheek makes Fives’ fist slide when he straddles Ordo’s chest and punches him in the eye. The next blow catches Ordo in the nose, sending another gush of blood down his chin, and the one after that dislocates Fives’ finger at the same time as it cracks Ordo’s cheekbone. His head lolls back against the floor, eyes flickering, hands growing clumsy where they’re searching for a handhold to unseat Fives. One more punch and Fives is sure he’ll be unconscious.

Just one more--

Someone catches his fist with one hand and pulls him backwards sharply by the throat with the other. Snarling, he tries to fight the man hauling him off of Ordo, his nails cutting trails into the forearm locked around his neck. 

“You won,” rumbles a voice he would recognize anywhere. “You won, vod’ika, let him go. Let it go.”

\---------

The fight goes out of Fives between one breath and the next and he collapses back into Rex’s grip. Echo surges to his feet as they both sink to the floor, following half a step behind Ahsoka until she drops to her knees beside Rex and lays her hands on Fives’ bare, bloodied chest. Instead he pauses over Ordo, who has managed to push himself up onto his elbows with Sergeant Skirata’s help and is nodding groggily along to something the old Mando is saying.

“Won’t be so quick to underestimate us regular old ARCs and CTs next time, will you?” he asks, his tone almost mild. He has no delusions that he could repeat Fives’ performance if Jaing or one of the Commandos decides to pick another fight. Kriff, his bad hip and knee are already locked up from too much time spent sitting on the floor. Hand to hand combat will never be his specialty again.

“No, I don’t suppose he will be,” Skirata chuckles, ruffling Ordo’s hair affectionately as he helps him sit up. Ordo doesn’t look as forgiving as his Sergeant seems to be, with his mouth  set in a grim line and his swollen eyes fixed on where Fives is being tended to by Kix and Ahsoka. “Your brother did your Captain and your Company proud today.”

“We aren’t a Company,” Echo replies as he turns away. “Not anymore.”

“Then what are you, ad’ika?”

Echo’s eyes narrow dangerously, his mouth turning down in a frown that he knows makes the scarred half of his face twist grotesquely. “Certainly not your sons, either, Sergeant Skirata,” he says without looking back.

\--------------

The tensions on board have mostly settled by the time Fives and Ordo have both been patched up and returned to their brothers. Anakin wouldn’t call it a  _ cordial _ environment by any means, but he’s no longer poised to jump to his feet and break up a fight - not that he telegraphed any of that in his usual lazy sprawl, or so he hopes. Now he stretches out a little further, kicking his feet up onto a spare chair as he studies the man on the other side of the table. Kal Skirata has a big reputation for such a little man, and Anakin has never missed Obi-wan as much as he does while listening to the old Sergeant’s pitch.

It sounds good. Maybe too good.

“And how do you know that the rapid aging can be cured?” he asks, trying to channel his former Master. He needs something more solid than this stranger’s word. “Do you have any proof?”

“No,” Skirata answers, drumming his fingers on the table impatiently. “But I’m a stubborn old bastard, or so I’m told, and I’ll find a way. With or without you. It would be easier with you, though - your manpower, your position outside of the Republic, and the particular...talents that the jetiise have to offer.”

“We’re not Jedi anymore.” They’re the first words Ahsoka has spoken since chastising Fives for picking a nearly impossible fight, and praising him for winning. Her tone is stuck somewhere between the petulant girl-child that the Order sent to Anakin on Christophsis and the dangerous young woman that years of constant war shaped her into, and her big blue eyes are narrowed into predatory slits as she watches Skirata and his boys. 

“One of your men said something similar.” Skirata waves his hand dismissively, seeming determined to get back to his point. “Jedi or not, you have a valuable skillset. Put it to good use saving lives.”

“They already are,” Rex interjects before Anakin can even open his mouth. It’s a good thing, too, because Anakin has no idea what he would have said to smooth things over between his apprentice and their less than welcome guest. “There are a thousand free men aboard this ship because of them. A hundred or more of my vode would have died in the time since we deserted the army. But, let me make sure I have this straight.”

Rex leans forward on his elbows and rests his chin on his hands, a pose he picked up from Obi-Wan if Anakin isn’t mistaken. Rex’s face is impassive, but his eyes are hard and calculating as he watches the old Mando across the table from them. “You want us to send our brothers on a fool’s errand, chasing a cure that you have no proof you can provide, and divert all of our resources to this crusade of yours, is that right?”

“I’m asking you to help your brothers live the lives they deserve.”

“And how many of my brothers will get this cure of yours? Your commandos, and maybe my vod’ika in the 501st, but how do you plan to give it to billions of us right under the nose of the Republic? And what if you find it too late, when my brothers are old and gray and have barely any life left to live?”

“And what if we find it tomorrow?” Jaing bites back.

“Then what do you need us for?” Ahsoka replies, joining Rex in leaning forward. 

Skirata grunts in what might be frustration or dismissal, or both - it’s hard to be sure. The old bastard plays his cards close to his chest, and Anakin hasn’t known him long enough to read him the way Obi-wan would be able to at a glance. “Stop wasting my time, boy,” Kal growls - a mistake. Anakin can _ feel _ Rex and Ahsoka bristle at the dismissive and condescending tone. “Either you’re with us, or you’re useless to us. So which is it?”

Before Rex can get more than a single syllable out, Anakin speaks. “That kind of black and white thinking is exactly what nearly got my padawan executed,” he grits out as calmly as he can. Warmth ripples through the Force from Ahsoka, countering the frustration he knows that he must be projecting. How she can be thinking of him - or anything other than her own anger - after breaking down on him just hours ago, Anakin will never know, but he’s endlessly grateful for her. The padawan he didn’t want, who has somehow become his lodestar. “My loyalty is to my men above all else. I won’t commit them to chasing dreams, but I will give them the choice. Any who want to join your mission may. For the rest...we’ll set our own course.”

Anakin pushes back from the table and stands, soon followed by Rex and Ahsoka. “Rex, assemble the men in the hangar. Skirata can make his case and then be on his way before we end up with more men in the medbay.”

\---------------

_ Twenty _ . Twenty troopers - all that remains of Rapid Company after their last battle as part of the GAR, plus a squad of shinies from the flight crew who have never seemed entirely sure of why the 501st deserted their brothers. Anakin’s heart clenches as he watches them separate themselves from the rest of the Legion, touching foreheads and clapping backs as they move through the ranks of men who have fought and bled beside them on dozens of far-flung worlds before finally assembling in neat lines in front of Ordo and Skirata. It’s more than Anakin had hoped to lose, but fewer than he feared.

“Traitors,” someone - it sounds like Jesse - hisses from behind him, putting voice to the feeling of betrayal and confusion rippling through the crowded hangar. 

A dull thud follows, then Rex’s voice, pitched low so that only the command team assembled on a low loading platform can hear. “Free men get to make their own choices. Even if they’re damned stupid ones.”

“Stupid and  _ traitorous _ .”

Anakin clears his throat deliberately, putting a stop to the chatter behind him before drawing on the Force to project his voice across the massive room. Silence falls immediately as every trooper’s head snaps up to look at him on instinct - still unnerving even after all these years. “Before you go, I’d like you to know that it’s been the greatest honor of my life to serve beside you - every single one of you. May the Force be with you on your new mission, brothers. Ret’urcye mhi.”

“May the Force be with you,” Ahsoka says. “You’ll always have a place in our barracks. K’oyacyi, ner vode.”

“K’oyacyi, vod’ika,” Rex echoes, saluting his brothers. 

As one, the men assembled around Skirata snap to attention and sharply salute the platform, only letting their arms drop when Ordo barks out a command Anakin can’t make out. They turn as one, marching in perfect formation onto the cargo ship awaiting their departure. 

Anakin watches until the ramp closes behind them and the ship’s engines whir to life, catapulting it out into the blackness of space, and tries to ignore the fact that his chest aches as badly as if he had just watched them die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cin Vhetin - clean slate, fresh start, lit. white field
> 
> Ret'urcye mhi - Goodbye; literally: "Maybe we'll meet again"
> 
> K'oyacyi! - "Cheers!" Can also mean "Hang in there" or "Come back safely."; literally a command: "Stay alive!"[
> 
> Ner vode - my brothers
> 
> vod'ika - little sibling
> 
> ori'vod - big brother/sister ('cause Rex is the whole 501st's big brother)


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...it didn't happen last Saturday, but it also didn't take a couple of months? I'm calling that a win. I'm traveling for the next week and a half, though, so no idea when the next chapter will be up (though it's already in progress).
> 
> As always, you can follow me on tumblr at [unwhithered](unwhithered.tumblr.com) and Mando'a translations are at the end.

**_Cin Vhetin, Outer Rim,_ ** **63 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

The thing that Kix drops onto Anakin’s workbench with a  _ thud _ bears more resemblance to a duracrete brick than a modern datapad. Unfortunately, it’s what the ship was equipped with when they stole it, and feeding, clothing  and arming the men has been a higher priority than upgrading their tech. Ahsoka eyes the ‘pad disdainfully and thinks that perhaps they should have paid more heed to Kix when he suggested refitting the medbay during their last resupply.

“Our brothers from the 212th are still a right mess,” Kix says, seating himself in the chair that Anakin had just cleared of parts with a push of the Force. Her Master hums his acknowledgement without looking up from the tangle of wires and circuit boards he’s teasing apart with a set of miniscule tools and the occasional delicate Force push or pull.

“See, Mira? This little guy was the problem all along.” Anakin holds a melted bit of metal up to the light before passing it to the Twi’lek girl perched beside him. She turns it over and over again in her green palm, studying it with the boundless curiosity of a young mind presented with something new and shiny. “There should be a replacement in one of those,” he waves at the haphazard stacks of bins and boxes on the far wall, “if you find one, I’ll let you install it.”

Ahsoka watches Mira leap to her feet and remembers watching Anakin work on machinery with the same awe when she first became his padawan. Now...she’s far too tired for all of that now, having just come off of night cycle watch duty on the bridge. By all rights she should be asleep in the quarters she shares with Anakin, but instead she had followed his Force signature down to the tiny room off of the main hangar that he’s turned into a workspace. Listening to him tinker with some of the many things on their ship in need of repair soothes her. Looking at the list of injuries and medical procedures displayed on Kix’s ‘pad does not. She waves for Kix to continue while she studies it. 

“I have no doubt they would have been sent to Kamino for reconditioning if General Kenobi had not intervened to send them to us instead. They’ve only been on board two days and I’m running out of bacta patches. One of the shinies needs a dip in a bacta tank, which I’m sure you know we don’t have, and we’re going to have to amputate Sergeant Rosie’s leg at the knee.” Kix drums his fingers on the bench as he speaks, in a rhythm Ahsoka recognizes from a marching song. In another man she would read it as a sign of anxiety. In Kix, she recognizes it as frustration, even anger, at his inability to help his brothers.

_ Medics have the worst jobs _ , she thinks, taking one last glance at the list of medical supplies they need but don’t have before passing the ‘pad along to Anakin. “We can sedate him for that with the Force if we don’t have anesthetic. Skyguy, could we build him a mech leg like your arm?”

“Yes,” Anakin answers, before looking up from the ‘pad to stare at Mira as she rummages through boxes of scrap. “And no. Not here. I don’t have the parts. But we need to resupply soon - as soon as possible, to keep a couple of these men alive. I can get what I need for a temporary prosthetic in any backwater spaceport, but these medical supplies...we’ll need to find real civilization for a buy this big to go unnoticed.”

Finding civilization is, of course, the easy part. It’s staying under the radar in a stolen ship, with a hoard of clones and two very famous former Jedi aboard that will be the problem.

“I need to get back to my patients, sirs, but I’ll notify Rex of the plan on my way to the medbay.”

They don’t have a plan, not really, but that doesn’t stop Kix from leaving just as fast as he came. In Ahsoka’s experience, after they’ve scraped bits of your insides off of your outside and stuffed them back where they belong once or twice medics stop caring much about who technically outranks whom and do as they please to save who they can. 

“I suppose we’d better have a plan by the time Rex gets here,” Anakin grumbles when the door shuts behind Kix. He’s never quite been able to look their medic in the eye since the day Kix had to pull the charred remains of Anakin’s mechanical arm away from the withered stump of his shoulder, no matter that the man has also seen him stark naked and injured in almost every other way imaginable over the years. “Mira, have you found that part yet?”

\----------

Quiet music plays in the background of the modest room Rex has claimed as his own. It’s bigger than his combined bunk-and-office unit on the  _ Resolute _ , and the bed is a fair sight more comfortable. He even bought a pillow for it at their last resupply stop, a big fluffy thing that looks like the clouds on Naboo and feels like sin to rest his head on, though it took a week to get used to sleeping on something so comfortable after a lifetime of hard bunks, cold ground and armor. 

Biter has laid claim to the pillow, which her entire tiny body fits comfortably on, dragging it onto the floor and curling up in front of the speaker for a nap. They discovered not long ago that she finds Rex’s favorite instrumental music particularly soothing, and she’s not the only one - Fives is dozing where he leans up against the wall beside her, his bruised face thrown into shadow by the dim cabin lights. Anakin watches Ahsoka snap a holo of the two of them before clearing his throat.

“I know there have been questions among the men about why I allowed so many to go with Skirata,” he says once the murmurs of side conversation have quieted. Ahsoka is perched on the edge of the bed, with Rex on one side and Echo on the other, while Jesse and Kix stand at parade rest near the door. The room is crowded and too warm, but it’s also full of familiar, comfortable presences in the Force overlapping and butting up against his own. “I’m not abandoning our brothers, and I’m not abandoning the mission we’ve taken on. But I’m not a general anymore, and you aren’t captain and commander and lieutenants. If we’re ever going to stand on equal footing then we have to let them make their own choices. All of them. And yes--” he holds up a finger to forestall the words he can see forming on Jesse’s lips, “that includes the choices that feel stupid and traitorous. Maybe Skirata will find his cure and they’ll be proven smarter than the rest of us. I don’t know. All I know is that what we’ve been doing - freeing slaves, fighting the battles that the Republic ignores - feels right, and I’m going to keep doing it for as long as it does. If it stops feeling right for any of you, or any of our men, you can leave with my blessing. If not, we have some planning to do.”

He watches from the corner of his eye as a silent chain of communication ripples through the room. Fives cracks one eye open to join Echo in looking to Ahsoka, who nudges Rex, who locks eyes with Jesse and Kix in turn before looking back at her. 

“We’re with you, Skyguy,” his former padawan replies in a voice that is far too serious and grown for a girl of 17. “And we’ve already got a plan--”

“Half of a plan,” Echo interrupts, earning him a sidelong glare from Ahsoka.

“Half of a plan. Jesse?”

A series of clicks that sounds unsettlingly like a grenade rolling across the floor sets Anakin’s teeth on edge, the sudden tension only easing when he realizes that the ball Jesse had tossed onto the bare floor of Rex’s cabin is a holoprojector, not an explosive. Light spills out of the tiny device and flares around Anakin, putting him in the middle of a cross section of the local star systems, with inhabited planets and relevant hyperspace lanes coded in familiar GAR colors.

“Here,” Ahsoka points to a glowing green world a half-day’s jump from their current location, “is a spaceport big enough for Kix to stock up on medicine, and for us to resupply with food and fuel. If we send a few squads in one of the shuttles, they can pick up what we need without drawing attention. They can even take Mira and Biter along for the ride - it’s been too long since they’ve been planetside.”

“Not you, though,” Echo says, looking from Ahsoka to Anakin. “Not either of you. Too recognizable in such a big place. They’ll have access to Republic holochannels there, and you’re two of the most famous faces in the galaxy.”

Ahsoka scowls, but nods her agreement. “Not us. We’ll be here,” she indicates two dull blue planets in nearby star systems, linked by a little-used hyperspace lane colored in smuggler’s gray. “Launching simultaneous strikes on a small slave auction and the  _ big _ spice farming operation that keeps it in business.” For a moment she falls silent and squirms slightly, before looking up at Anakin as if she’s still an unsure fourteen year old. 

Gods, how the war has aged her, and yet in some ways hardly changed her at all. Not for the first time, Anakin wonders what Ahsoka might have been like if she had grown into knighthood in peacetime - he thinks she might have become a tactician and negotiator to rival his own Master.

“I like how it sounds so far, Snips. Tell me more.”

She smiles with big, sharp teeth and youthful joy at being praised, suffusing the Force around them with warmth. Anakin closes his eyes for a moment and soaks it in - this momentary feeling of warmth and happiness and home - before fixing her with an expectant gaze, one eyebrow cocked.

\----------

Ahsoka’s plan is good - just daring enough to work, with enough contingencies to get them the hell out of dodge if something goes wrong. Unlike many in the GAR, she prizes the lives of her men over the mission objective, no matter what it is. That’s just one of the many reasons Rex took a thousand of his brothers and followed his jetiise into the unknown.

Before long he’s preparing to follow her out into the vastness of space once more, with a hundred brothers at his back. Or, in this case, in front of him as he supervises the loading of the last of their supplies - mostly ration bars and weapons - and counts off to make sure that everyone is where they’re supposed to be. Across the hangar, Jesse is watching over a similar last minute burst of energy as another company’s worth of men prepare the shuttle Skywalker will be flying to the slave auction. Before the loading ramp of the  _ Cabur  _ closes up behind them, Jesse snaps a salute to Rex, disappearing up into the cargo hold before Rex can return the farewell gesture.

He does anyway, holding the position and watching as Anakin lifts off and guides the  _ Cabur _ out through the energy shield and into the stars. Only when his own loading ramp begins lifting beneath his feet does Rex turn around, clicking his teeth together twice in quick succession to activate the comm lodged uncomfortably deep in his ear.

“All set down here,” he says, thumping the durasteel wall of the cargo hold with one gauntleted fist. He isn’t entirely sure where he picked up the habit - from one of the mongrel members of the Republic Navy, he thinks. The mongrels have so many silly, superstitious little habits like that, along with fidgets and tics of the kind that were strictly forbidden on Kamino. Clones who displayed too many odd behaviors had a tendency to...disappear, after all. “Get us into hyperspace before the Hour of Remembrance, vod.”

Nothing about the shuttle’s cramped hallways and odd nooks and hideaways makes sense to Rex, even after a few months of exploring the thing, and he nearly gets lost on his way to mess hall. The ships in the Grand Army’s fleet are as familiar to him as the back of his hand - everything has a place, a purpose, and a clear label on the ship’s schematics. Slavers and smugglers are not so fastidious about maintenance and records, and they’re still discovering new hiding places in the  _ Cin Vhetin _ and its shuttles, sometimes with unpleasant and illegal cargo still packed into them. 

The mess, at least, has been cleaned until it shines, and most of the clones on board are already standing in neat lines between the rows of tables and benches. A few stragglers rush in as Rex takes up his position beside Ahsoka, everyone watching the chrono on the wall tick closer to the hour. As the deck shudders  beneath their feet, marking the ship’s jump into hyperspace, the chrono beeps to indicate the new hour, and Rex’s vode - even his tiny former commander - speak as one.

“Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum.”

A beat of silence follows, quickly broken by Echo speaking up from the other side of Ahsoka. “Droidbait, Cutup and Hevy.” His tone is calm and measured in the way Rex learned long ago means a brother is holding back emotions, and maybe even tears. Ahsoka’s has the same quality when she recites the names of the dead, mixing Jedi with clones in equal measure, and betraying her sorrow by reaching out to tangle her fingers with Rex’s for support.

He squeezes her hand, their fingers fitting together in a familiar and comforting grip. If Rex tried to list all the brothers he has watched die - commanded to march to their deaths - they would be standing in the mess hall for a day, at least, so he settles for the names of his batchmates, nearly all of whom fell during the first Battle of Geonosis. Kriff, it feels like a lifetime ago that he fell out of that gunship with Senator Amidala. Then again, the past three years add up to almost a quarter of his life, so perhaps that makes sense.

For the rest of the hour the mess echoes with the similar yet distinct voices of an entire company remembering the brothers they have lost, until the last voice trails off seconds before the numbers change again. Heavy silence hangs over them all, the occasional ragged breath indicating someone breaking down while everyone else politely pretends not to hear for fear of setting off their own tears.

“We have a long, boring night in hyperspace ahead of us, boys,” Ahsoka finally pipes up. She releases Rex’s hand and hops easily up onto the table in front of them, turning to face the crowd and flashing a smile that is only a little brittle around the edges. “So who’s gonna beat me at sabacc first? Don’t tell Skyguy, but I’ve got a few of his chocolate bars to bet…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum - "I'm still alive, but you are dead. I remember you, so you are eternal"—Daily remembrance of those passed on, followed by the names of those being remembered


	11. Hell Bound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some of the clones have pretty, silly flower names, because they can. Fight me. :P

**The Shuttle** **_Aran,_ ** **64 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

Karn-11 is a small, pink and blue sphere orbiting a volatile looking gas giant. Ahsoka leans forward in the co-pilot’s seat to study it, as if just by looking at it she can divine some bit of useful information that the command team’s combined data-gathering and planning hadn’t already found. From space it looks serene, almost welcoming, but she already knows that while the atmosphere is breathable to humans and near-humans such as herself, the water is toxic to them and prolonged exposure to the planet’s frequent rains would result in vicious chemical burns. It’s perfect, however, for nourishing the dense forests of giant pink and purple fungi that cover most of the planet’s surface. 

The angle of their approach keeps them on the far side of the moon from its small settlement and  _ large _ spice mining operation until they’ve broken atmo. Sergeant Jet hurtles them toward the surface in what would be an uncomfortably steep dive for anyone who wasn’t used to a certain Skywalker’s piloting - meaning that Ahsoka doesn’t even flinch when Jet pulls them up a hairs breadth from the surface of the churning sea and sends them skimming along the tops of twenty foot waves. 

“Looks just like Kamino in a storm,” someone breathes over the comms, followed moments later by the soft  _ thunk  _ of someone else’s hand gently impacting the speaker’s head.

“Keep thoughts like that to yourself before a mission, di’kut.”

Ahsoka ignores the minor spat in favor of leaning even farther forward as the smallest of Karn-11’s three continents comes into view on the horizon, appearing to suddenly and rapidly rise from the ocean and solidify into jagged cliffs. A proximity sensor begins to wail its warning - she ignores that, too, trusting in her pilot as he flips them and hugs the coastline more closely than the ship itself is comfortable with. Thanks to the artificial gravity, she feels almost nothing, and can divide her focus evenly between the map in one corner of the viewscreen and the landscape they’re passing. She memorizes every landmark as best she can in the milliseconds they’re visible, well aware that knowing the territory can mean the difference between life and death when a plan goes sideways. While she doesn’t intend to allow that to happen, war has taught her that pride is foolish and that no victory is assured.

A particularly memorable rock formation on the edge of the cliffs marks their landing site - it’s one of the few clear spots outside of the settlement’s small spaceport large enough to land a ship, and the only one far enough from the mines to avoid tripping proximity sensors. With any luck they’ll have gone unnoticed.

Along with Jesse and Rex, she had debated the merits of posing as legitimate travelers, or even smugglers looking to expand their operation into the drug trade. If only the clones weren’t so eerily similar looking they might have managed either ruse, but they don’t have the supplies to adequately disguise more than a few of them, or the time to waste acquiring them. Instead they’ll do things the 501st way - quick, brutal and with overwhelming force. The backdoor that their slicers had established into GAR and Republic intelligence shortly after their desertion has gleaned them every bit of information gathered by Justice’s departments on slavery and the illegal drug trade before the departments themselves were deprioritized, their resources shifted toward supporting the war effort. Ahsoka barely catches herself and avoids letting out an irritated growl at the thought that arresting  _ slavers _ and drug dealers isn’t a priority for the Republic.

It doesn’t matter. They don’t belong to the Republic any longer, and freeing slaves is a priority for  _ them _ . 

“You know what to do, Jet,” she says, clapping the pilot on the shoulder as she stands. “Stay off the comms and keep an ear out for the evacuation signal. And don’t lose too many credits to Echo while you’re waiting.”

“No promises on that last one, sir. Echo’s a card shark,” Jet replies. He’s efficiently shutting down the ship’s systems even while smiling up at her, his hands working on memory alone. If she met him on the street, Ahsoka would guess Jet is thirty, not thirteen. Fine lines spider-web from the corners of his mouth and his warm brown eyes, and his skin puckers awkwardly around a scar on his chin. 

Kriff, she hopes Skirata does find his miracle cure. She’s sick of watching boys even younger than herself age far faster than she can keep up with. Rather than speak, she tips her head in acknowledgement, shoots a joking salute at Echo where he sits by the comm unit, and heads down to join the rest of her men as they disembark and assemble into two groups of forty. A team of ten remains behind under Echo’s command, waiting for the signal to swoop in and begin evacuating the freed slaves once the strike force led by Rex and Ahsoka has secured the compound - or to provide emergency support, should it become necessary.

Ahsoka prays to the Force that  it won’t be necessary.

\-----------

**_Morrow_ ** **, Outer Rim, 65 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

“Do you think the comm-” Dice elbows his brother sharply in the ribs. The General and the Commander insist that the men shouldn’t call them by their titles now that they no longer belong to the GAR, which seems backwards to Dice - their Mando trainers didn’t hold any real rank, either, but it’s a sign of  _ respect _ , one that they’ve earned regardless of their formal positions in any military. In this context, at least, it makes sense. Bad enough that they have a few dozen clones wandering around an active spaceport just begging to be recognized, they need to avoid any mention of the military, or anything else that might give them away and get the Republic on their tail.

“Do you think  _ So’ika _ would like this?” Bev asks, holding up a strip of something blue with glittering silver stones decorating it in triangle patterns. When Dice peers at it more closely he recognizes it as a headband like the akul-tooth one that the Commander wears. It looks ridiculous and delicate in Bev’s heavily tattooed hand, but it’s just the right shade of 501st blue to match the tunic she’s taken to wearing, and he’s never once seen her buy a damned thing for herself since they started profiting enough from their self imposed missions to pick up more than the bare necessities. Hells, he’s not even sure that she and the General draw the small stipends they insist the men be given from every take.

Hitching Biter higher on his hip when she begins to wiggle like she wants to escape, he finally nods. Bev grins from ear to ear, warping the swirling tattoos that decorate almost every inch of his face, and goes to pay for the headband and and the shiny blue hairclip he picked out for Biter. Dice can’t imagine how they’re going to keep the toddler from losing it, but it’s his vod’s money to waste. It’s not as if he knows what to do with it either - the concept of being compensated for their labor isn’t something any of the clones are familiar with, and it feels both thrilling and selfish to use the small handful of credits clicking in his belt pouch to buy things just for himself. He’s already bought a new holdout blaster and a pair of sturdy boots to replace the worn out pair he found in one of the ship’s storage lockers months ago, and when he wanders over to the next stall in the crowded marketplace he spends another ten-credit piece to buy Biter a candied  _ unu _ fruit and a bag full of colorful sweets. Biter giggles while she nibbles at the edges of the fruit, her chin quickly becoming covered in melting candy and stray drool that will doubtless end up all over the front of Dice’s shirt and in his long hair. As far as he’s concerned, it’s a small price to pay to see the unadulterated joy in her often sad eyes. 

And anyway, they’ll be back aboard ship and she’ll be Fives’ problem once more by the time her sugar high kicks in.

Bev jostles Dice’s shoulder when he joins them and leans in to steal a bite of fruit from the toddler on Dice’s hip, making her squeal in amusement and bat him away. “Our order’s ready,” Bev says with his mouth full. “Best go pick it up before Kix pitches a fit about us wasting time.”

\-------------

**_Vas 5_ ** **, Outer Rim, 65 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight and General in the Grand Army of the Republic would have stayed his hand. He would have taken prisoners and brought them back to face the Republic’s justice - or what passed for it - if only because Obi-wan would have been disappointed if he did anything else. The more time he spends away from the Order, answering to no one but himself and his padawan and his men, the more he realizes how much of his life has been spent trying to avoid disappointing his Master, trying to please the only being in the galaxy whose opinion matters more to him than his own. 

Sometimes he isn’t sure how to  _ be _ Anakin Skywalker without Obi-wan Kenobi by his side.

But whoever he is now, he isn’t a Jedi Knight, and he doesn’t answer to a council or a Senate. He pulls the trigger and watches, silently, as the auction master crumples to the floor beneath the desk Anakin had found him cowering under.

Blood pools around his feet as he sits and begins slicing into the auction master’s computer terminal.

\------------

**_Karn-11,_ ** **Outer Rim, 65 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

The days on Karn-11 are short, and by the time Ahsoka’s party reaches the mines darkness is falling over the strange forest. It ends abruptly, towering fungi cut down to leave thirty yards of cleared ground stretching between the edge of the forest and the towering walls surrounding the mine, all of it starkly illuminated by floodlights. A road cuts through the foliage a hundred yards to their right and leads to a thick durasteel gate framed by guard towers. Its mirror image should continue out the other side of the massive compound, leading straight to the landing field where Echo’s team will evacuate them.

Ahsoka takes stock of the situation in a heartbeat, seeing exactly what she expects, and allows herself to bounce nervously on her toes several times before signaling for the troopers to join her. Rex has already commed to say his force is in position at the other gate, just waiting for her command. She doesn’t intend to keep him waiting long.

“On my mark,” she murmurs through the comms, feeling rather than seeing the men form up beside her, just within the shadow of the forest. She stoops, then drops to her knees in the dark earth and reaches for the Force, grounding herself in the pulsing life of this strange planet. The fungi feel almost...aware, in a way that makes the back of her neck prickle with unease, but she calls on them anyway, calls their energy up through her. Up and up and up she draws it, until her body is wound tight and thrumming with awareness of everything around her, and her awareness stretches out across the bare space toward the wall.

Bare, but far from barren, the soil teems with microscopic life. Even the stone and duracrete of the walls is covered in it, and while the gate might be made of slick, lifeless durasteel, Ahsoka can feel the spaces in between. She searches for their weak points - the hidden locking mechanism, and the invisible hinge that lets them swing inward. Once Anakin had taught her to forget about the scale of things, gates and locks and doors, at least the simple kind, had become no harder to open than a pair of Separatist handcuffs. This gate is particularly crude, and when she breathes out and presses just so on the internal tumblers it gives way. 

“Now.”

There is no telltale flash of blaster fire, only a few low  _ cracks _ and then darkness, the floodlights shattering beneath an onslaught of old fashioned projectiles. Forty points of light and life surge past Ahsoka as one - Tup and Tinker, Cart, Peony and the rest leaping forward before they can lose the element of surprise. Ahsoka waits until they are only a few yards from the gate, then gives it one last push and jumps up to race after her men, drawing even with them in time to catch one of the guards’ first blaster shots in the shoulder. 

Her tunic burns, but the body armor beneath holds - she’ll have a nasty bruise to show off tomorrow. The enemy falls with a blade in his throat before she can even raise her blaster.

“Careful, Commander,” Peony drawls, his vowels stretching lazily, as if he isn’t running full tilt into a hail of blaster fire. “I’d hate to bring Kix another patient when he’s already got his hands full with the new boys.”

With a wave of her hand Ahsoka sends one the approaching guards careening into a wall, and smirks sharp-toothed at Peony when he startles. He was still a shiny when they left the GAR, and he still isn’t quite used to working with honest-to-god Force users in the field. Ahsoka can feel his eyes on her as she darts ahead, dropping targets efficiently despite how unwieldy her dual blasters still feel in her hands. 

Alarms sound throughout the compound moments before the entire place goes dark - Rex’s men must have breached the gate and cut the power already, leaving only flickering emergency lights to illuminate the open pit mines and haphazardly placed buildings. After a few blinks to let her eyes adjust, Ahsoka can see almost as well in the dark as in the light of day, and a quick glance around confirms that the clones are flipping down their night vision goggles and continuing on as if nothing at all has changed. Their enemies, well trained and well paid mercenaries though they may be, are not prepared for fighting in such faint light - especially the dozens of men who are scrambling out of their barracks half-dressed and clutching blasters.

“Northeast quarter barracks clear,” Rex’s voice rumbles through her montrals. 

A small explosion in the southeast corner of the compound briefly lights the night sky,  the no-nonsense commands of one of her Sergeants rises above the screams and wails of terrified civilians. “Get back inside. Get inside and stay quiet. We aren’t here to harm you, it’s your masters we’re after.”

“Northwest barracks clear,” shouts a voice she can’t quite place. “Commander, there’s a fire in the command building, I think they’re destroying records.”

“Commander, we can’t breach the doors. Not enough charges.”

“Commander, it sounds like they’ve got hostages in there.”

“Kriff.” Ahsoka dispatches the last member of a squad stupid enough to charge her and takes stock of the situation. Red blaster fire ricochets around her, clones and mercenaries are engaged in combat in every direction, and an open pit yawns between her and the command center. “I’m on my way.”

With a quick prayer to the Force, she dodges beneath a mercenary’s wild swing and runs toward the pit, reaching for the Force once more and leaping at the last second.

\------------

**_Cin Vhetin, Morrow Spaceport,_ ** **65 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

“How much of this is what Kix ordered, and how much of it is...personal?” Fives asks, eying the hover platforms loaded down with so many crates and packages they look ready to collapse. 

Bev’s half-shrug speaks volumes, as does Dice’s unapologetic smirk. Fives runs one gloved hand over his face and sighs. Being left in command of the  _ Cin Vhetin _ hadn’t seemed like such a bad punishment at first - aside from missing out on a good fight - but as his brothers begin to trickle back in from their various assignments Fives is starting to understand why Rex has a permanent furrow between his brows. 

“Here.” Dice tosses a bag at him one handed, and follows it moments later with Biter in much the same fashion. 

Fives barely avoids dropping the bag in the process of catching the squealing, airborne toddler - the kid makes a hell of a lot of noise for someone who refuses to speak. Settling her on his hip, Fives opens the sack to find dozens of brightly colored balls. “Candy? Soldier, are you trying to bribe a commanding officer?”

“Bribe, sir?” Dice’s grin might have looked innocent, if not for the ropy scar that cuts across his right cheek and tugs the corner of his mouth down awkwardly. “Never. We just brought a gift for our ori’vod.”

“Thought there weren’t ranks anymore, anyway,” Bev adds. He grunts as he pushes one of the overladen platforms out of the way of the next party to return. “Except the medics. Medics outrank everyone. We’d better get this to the medbay before they get cranky, sir.”

“Get out of my sight,” Fives sighs, already turning to face the next set of conspicuously overburdened clones - and catching one of Biter’s sticky hands before she can touch his face. His eyes narrow. “What in all the Sith hells is she covered in?!”

Only laughter answers him in the moments before Dice and Bev disappear around a corner and leave him with a sticky, giggling, squirming toddler and a whole line of smirking troopers to check in.

Fives is going to have new wrinkles by the time Rex returns from his mission.

\------------

**_Karn-11,_ ** **65 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

These doors are more high-tech, but even the most advanced and carefully monitored defenses have physical components that can be manipulated. Or, in this case, broken, as Ahsoka warps and crushes the tumblers and latches until one solid kick from Tup is enough to cave the doors in. Smoke billows out to meet them, and Ahsoka pauses long enough to untie the sash around her waist and fashion it into a makeshift mask that covers her nose and mouth, filtering out at least some of the ash.

“Tup, Krayt, Eel and Sig, evacuate the hostages,” she orders. “Peony, follow me. I want the operations manager alive, and as much of that data preserved as possible.”

Superior night vision does Ahsoka no good once they’re surrounded by the thick, oily smoke, lit eerily in some places by strips of emergency lights on the floor and ceiling. She follows the sound of crackling flames, Peony close on her heels to avoid losing her in the smoke, while the others break off in search of the frantic screams coming from deep in the building. It’s slow going, and sweat makes her palms slippery where they cradle her blasters and trickles down her back, doubtless turning the filth on her skin into mud.

“Commander,” Peony hisses, tapping her shoulder. “To the left. I hear voices.”

Ahsoka can hear them, too, if she strains - someone is barking orders on the other side of a door at the end of the hall. A door that, when they reach it, is burning hot to the touch. Ahsoka hisses and shakes out her hand, using the other one to wipe futilely at her eyes. The smoke is too thick, she can’t see anything, and she’s opening her mouth to speak when she hears Peony shout in triumph.

“I found the door panel, commander. I think I can get it open.”

“Wait--”

A blaster discharges to her right and the hall is briefly lit by a shower of sparks from the fried panel. Hot air and blinding orange light flood the hallway a moment later. Ahsoka can feel her exposed skin blistering, and primal panic wells in her chest, a fear of flames written so deep in her genetic code that a lifetime of Jedi training can’t erase it. Apparently, Peony has no such instinctive fear. He plunges into the wall of flames, trusting his body armor to withstand a few moments of the deadly heat, and Ahsoka has no choice but to choke down her fear and follow after him.

The world disappears. Her lungs are burning, her lekku curl in pain, and her blood feels one step shy of boiling dry in her veins - and just when Ahsoka thinks she’s going to die in this fiery hellscape, she’s on the other side, thirstily sucking in smoky air and frantically stripping off the remains of her still burning tunic.

“Back away from the console,” Peony orders, his blaster trained on two men who appear to be pulling data crystals out of a computer array and throwing them into the flames that have swallowed up almost half the room. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Ahsoka spots the can of accelerant they must have used to start the blaze - and the third man in the room, who is holding a knife to a young man’s throat with one hand and pointing a blaster at Peony with the other. “On your left,” she screams, a heartbeat too slowly.

Two blasters discharge within seconds of each other. Ahsoka’s shot is true, catching their assailant directly between the eyes and dropping him before he can harm the boy in his grip, but so is his. Peony’s body crumples as if in slow motion, the blaster falling from his limp fingers and his head bouncing off the floor hard enough to concuss him if he wasn’t already dead. Any sound he might have made in his last moments is swallowed by the flames and Ahsoka’s own scream of anger as the fear-pain-regret of his life force leaving his body rushes through her before disappearing into the Force as if it never was. As if her brother hadn’t just died in front of her, as if his body was always a lifeless husk sprawled on the floor.

Time blurs, and Ahsoka has no memory of raising her blasters and killing the operations manager and his assistant, only of stepping over their bodies to confirm that there are no salvageable data crystals before dropping to her knees beside Peony. Someone is screaming in the distance, barely audible over the roar of the fire. Maybe it’s the boy. Maybe it’s another hostage. It doesn’t matter, she doesn’t care, she can’t care about anything except the fact that her brother is dead and it’s  _ all her fault _ . If she hadn’t been so consumed by her own fear, she could have sensed the threat. If she had spent more time training with her blasters, she could have shot a half-second faster and saved his life. If she hadn’t been such a stupid little girl she could have made a better plan, could have kept them all safer, could have--

Flames are licking at her boots and singeing the ends of Peony’s long hair when a young man’s voice draws her back to the present. Not one of the clones - she’s seen them cry, but she’s never heard any of them sob in terror and plead for help, and doubts their pride would allow such a thing. 

“Please, I don’t want to die, please help me, please,” he screams, shaking in terror as he stares at the flames that have engulfed all of the walls. The ceiling groans ominously above them, ready to collapse at any moment, and Ahsoka almost ignores it all in favor of clutching Peony’s limp hand.

Almost. But she came here to save the helpless, not to stand by and watch them die. 

Standing, she hauls Peony off the floor with a grunt of effort and throws him over one of her narrow shoulders, barely keeping her feet as she uses the last of her energy to call on the Force. Weakened by the fire, the outside wall falls easily beneath her will, and she pushes the crying boy ahead of her and stumbles through the hole on his heels. They make it a whole ten feet before she collapses once more, her knees giving out beneath her as her lungs convulse in a desperate attempt to draw in as much of the cleaner outside air as possible.

The boy runs off into the chaos of the compound, and she doesn’t have the energy to care. Breathing hurts. Moving hurts. Coughing hurts most of all.

Ahsoka’s last conscious thought is that she should have closed Peony’s eyes. Instead, they stare sightlessly up at Karn-11’s glittering night sky while her own slip shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always you can follow me on tumblr at [unwhithered](unwhithered.tumblr.com), where I rant about clones and GOT and politics and post bits and bobs of this + other clone wars fic/headcanons. <3


	12. Take the Pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might need a tissue for this chapter, I'm not entirely sure.

**_Karn-11,_ ** **Outer Rim, 65 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

**14 Standard Hours After Landing**

Ahsoka wakes up exactly as she had passed out - choking on smoke, with the sharp tang of blood on the back of her tongue and rough duracrete beneath her cheek. “Stay down,” are the first words she hears, barked in a familiar-but-not voice. She can’t recognize the clone crouched over her beneath the cloth covering his mouth and nose and the ash coating every inch of his bare skin, and the Force is roiling with too much pain and fear for her to sense his identity.

Ignoring him, she pushes up onto her elbows and then rolls onto her knees, stalling out there as she gasps for breath. “The mission?” she coughs, looking around at an unfamiliar landscape half obscured in smoke.

“All threats have been neutralized, sir, and we cleared the slave quarters. All civilians appear to be present and accounted for. We’ve retreated to the landing strip and left the complex to burn. The evac transport is having trouble landing in this smoke, but sunrise is in one standard hour. Jet says they’ll be able to land after that.”

A silent nod is all Ahsoka can manage. There are shadowy forms moving around in the smoke, some with the purpose and confidence of the clones and others, obviously civilians, stumbling and hesitating as they follow. Voice cracking, she finally manages to ask the question that has been lurking at the back of her mind in the minutes since she woke. “The men?”

“A dozen injuries, mostly burns. Nothing a few bacta patches can’t handle. One fatality, sir.”

“Peony,” she murmurs. The smoke is making her eyes water, and she rubs at them in frustration, only succeeding in smearing more ash into them. She doesn’t bother to ask what they’ve done with his body - there is no time for collecting the dead on the battlefield, no time for proper burials. Even if the Republic cremated all of the fallen clones, the fires would burn around the clock for years to come.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not sir,” she corrects out of habit, “just Ahsoka.” Then, guessing based on the rapid clip of his speech and the way his hands twitch on his blaster, as if he wants to gesture while he speaks, “Are you injured, Tig?”

“No, s- ‘Soka,” he corrects himself at the last second, his voice wavering slightly on her name. She guessed his name right, at least. He’s young, not quite a shiny, just one of the millions pushed out of training and onto the front lines too young as the Republic’s losses piled up and the unforgiving machine of war grew more desperate.

“Good. Then find Rex for me, please. Apparently I’m not going anywhere fast.”

\-------------

Directing the evacuation of several hundred frightened slaves is no easy task. No matter how often Rex and his men repeat it, they don’t seem to believe that the clones are here to rescue them rather than simply steal them away to a new life of misery - not that he can blame them. The lot of them look half-starved, with the clear welts left by old fashioned whips visible on their exposed skin, and his men had reported finding a half dozen bodies in the depths of the mines, likely beaten to death by their masters.

By the time Rex knocks perfunctorily and lets himself into the small cabin set aside for Ahsoka, their guests have been settled into the now uncomfortably cramped medical bay and he has personally visited every one of his injured men. He knows that it’s the least she would expect of him. In fact, the first words out of her mouth, before her eyes even open, are “how are our brothers?”

“Missing a little skin,” he replies, deliberately downplaying the extent of their burns and blaster scorches even though he knows she’ll pick up on the half-truth. “Already bragging about their new scars.” That part, at least, is completely honest.

“Of course they are.” Slowly, carefully, Ahsoka pushes herself into a sitting position and scoots back to lean against the wall. Everything in him itches to offer a helping hand. Instead, he cracks a half-hearted smile and sits in the empty space at the foot of her hard bunk.

“You look like hell, little’un.”

“You’re not such a pretty sight yourself, Rexter. Have you seen the medics? Don’t lie.”

“No,” he admits, his smile turning sheepish. “They have their hands full. Echo took a look at me, thinks I just cracked a few ribs. This might not be Kamino grade,” he raps his knuckles against the singed body armor strapped tightly to his torso, “but it did its job.”

“It did.” Ahsoka stretches until she can prop her feet - one of the few unbandaged parts of her - in Rex’s lap, her toes curling into the warmth of his muscular thigh. One of his hands drops automatically to cradle the soles of her feet, filthy and smelly though they are. His thumb traces the white marks on the outside of her right foot until her nose scrunches and her feet flex. She’s ticklish, but too proud to give into the urge laugh and kick him away. Or too tired, too sad. “It did, for some of us. Not for Peony.”

“Nothing this can do about a headshot.”

“No, but I could have.” Her eyes are closed when Rex looks over, and her full lips are pressed into a thin line, the skin on them blistered and peeling. Stark white bandages cover most of her exposed skin. She needs bacta fast to prevent scarring, but he knows she’ll insist that their passengers are treated first, just like he will. “Done something. I could have done something, but I was afraid of the fire and it made me stupid, and he died, and it’s my fault. It was my plan.” Her breath catches, going ragged, and her feet tense in his hands. He catches them before she can pull away, digs his thumbs into the arches and rubs soothing circles until she can’t help but let them relax again.

“It was a good plan, ‘Soka, but even a jetii as wise as General Kenobi can’t predict everything that might go wrong. Battles are unpredictable, casualties are inevitable.”

“There weren’t any casualties last time, when Anakin made the plan!”

“Skywalker was lucky. Hundreds of my brothers have died following him into battle.” It’s still hard to criticize his jetii aloud, even to Ahsoka. Anakin has spent years inviting Rex’s opinion on everything from battle strategies to which colorful street food to buy in their rare down time, but this is different than pointing out flaws in one of his plans to his face. He would be reprimanded for it if another officer in the GAR heard, or put on punishment duty if he was still on Kamino. But he’s not an officer anymore, is he? “We’ve all been lucky since we deserted. It had to end eventually.”

“It didn’t have to end like  _ that _ .”

“Maybe not.” Rex shrugs, glancing between Ahsoka’s feet and her scrunched face. There are a few stray tracks through the grime on her cheeks, and a wet glisten at the corners of her closed eyes. “But it did. So we’ll learn from it, and we’ll try again. There’s nothing else we can do.”

“We could stop,” she sniffles, rubbing at her eyes. The white bandages on her hands come away gray with soot and leave her face no cleaner than it was before. “We could just...stop. Stop fighting, stop dying. Find some backwater planet to settle on and let our men figure out what they want to do without anyone ordering them from one pointless battle to the next.”

“That battle wasn’t pointless,” Rex growls, bristling at the idea that his brother died for nothing. “Peony died so that those slaves could live free. Don’t try to take that away from him. Don’t tell any of those men that what they’re putting their lives on the line for is  _ pointless _ . We chose this, all of us. Skywalker has given us every opportunity to make our own way, but we  _ chose _ this, we chose to follow you out into the black, to follow your plans, it’s the first thing most of those boys have ever gotten to choose for themselves.”

Ahsoka recoils, pulling her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them despite how clearly it causes her pain. “I didn’t mean it like that. I didn’t mean...I don’t know what I meant...I’m just so sick of watching our brothers die!”

“I’ve been watching them die my whole life, So’ika.” It’s not something Rex usually talks about. If the Jedi, his Jedi, don’t know the extent of what was done to the clones on Kamino, all the better as far as he’s concerned. “At least now it’s for something we believe in.” He turns and reaches for her, touching her cheek with the rough pads of his fingers. “Peony believed in our mission. He believed in you. Remember that. Remember  _ him _ , and he will be eternal.”

Though she doesn’t reply aloud, Ahsoka tips her head into his touch and sighs. They sit like that for a long time, too tired to move and taking comfort in the familiarity of the person beside them.

\-----------

**_Cin Vhetin_ ** **, Outer Rim, 66 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

Bev is no medic, but he knows the basics. Enough to splint a few broken bones and slap bacta patches in the right places, at least, so while Kix and the real medics attend to their new passengers he sees to his brothers. Skywalker’s crew have a few breaks and scorch marks scattered among them, and more than their fair share of bruises, but it’s when Ahsoka’s party returns that things get busy. 

Most of the burns will be reduced to little more than shiny scars in a few days. The worst of them, however, have to be debrided by a real medic before they’re sent on to Bev for their bacta treatment. As usual, the jetiise filter in last.

“This should have been treated hours ago, sir,” Bev grumbles as he smears a thick coating of bacta onto Ahsoka’s arms with a glorified spatula. She takes it like a champ, only wincing when he touches the worst of the damage, where several layers of burnt tissue had to be peeled away. “You’re going to scar.”

“I know. Aren’t Mandalorians proud of their scars, Bev?” she teases weakly, biting one of her blistered lips. “They show what you survived.”

“Since when are you a Mandalorian?” he shoots back, setting the bacta aside for the moment and carefully winding sterile bandages up her forearms.

“I’m not. But it seems like a smart idea. Being proud of your scars, I mean.”

Bev hums his agreement as he moves on, dabbing carefully at her sensitive lekku and the blistered patch at the crown of her montrals. It’s when he notices that her headband is missing that he stops - he’s never once seen her without it, in the two years that he’s been serving with the 501st. He wonders if she even knows it’s gone. His back pocket is all but burning as he forces himself back into motion, spreading bacta across the peeling skin over her collarbones and circling the table to finish with her upper back. The rest of her, thank the Force, had been protected by her body armor and is only bruised.

He puts his instruments away, cleans his hands of sticky bacta - he’ll have the softest, loveliest hands in the 501st after this stint of pretending to be a medic - and carefully finishes applying Ahsoka’s bandages before pacing slowly back around to face her. The stones of his spur of the moment purchase are cool against his palm and click against each other as he pulls the headband out of his pocket. It isn’t expensive, not like the fancy jewelry that Skywalker’s Senator had worn as if it was made for her, but it’s the right color, and it sparkles, which he reminds himself as he holds it out awkwardly between them in a hand that is  _ definitely not _ shaking.

“I don’t know if this is a good time, but, uhm,” he rubs his shaved head awkwardly. “It seems you’ve lost your headband, s-Soka, and I picked this up on Morrow. For you. If you’d like it.”

There’s a long silence as Ahsoka reaches out and takes it from his hand, smoothing out the supple leather of the band and touching one of the stones. Bev shifts on his feet awkwardly, not sure exactly what he’s waiting for until he gets it - a smile. Wide and bright and just for him, so big that it bursts a blister on her lip and she doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Thank you, Bev,” she murmurs, lifting it slowly and fastening it in place of the akul tooth band. “It fits perfectly. I love it.”

Ahsoka slides off the table slowly, hissing in pain, and leans toward him. Bev meets her automatically, their foreheads bumping in a helmetless Keldabe kiss, a universal gesture of affection among brothers.

“Can I ask you for a favor?” she asks when they pull apart, her smile having faded to something small and sad.

“Anything I can give, I will.”

“You gave Peony his tattoo, didn’t you? That flower he took his name from?” 

“I did.” Bev got his name for a reason, after all, having earned it several months into his first deployment when he went from watching a brother from the 212th tattoo Rex’s handprint onto Echo’s chest, to picking up the gun for himself. He’s done all of the tattoos in the 501st ever since.

“He died because of me,” she murmurs, looking at the ground and fiddling with her new headband. “He’s the first man to die under my command. Just mine. I’d...I’d like to remember him, and he loved that tattoo. Do you think you could recreate it?”

“Of course. Just as soon as all this has healed, if that’s alright.”

Ahsoka nods, lifting up on her toes once more to bump their foreheads and murmur another quiet thank you into the space between them. “I’ll find you once it has.”

\-----------

The main hangar is the only place aboard ship big enough for all of the clones to gather at once, packed shoulder-to-shoulder between the shuttles and crates of supplies that are still being sorted. Anakin stands on a catwalk with Rex, Fives, Echo and Jesse at his back, and Ahsoka a few steps to the side. Her head is bowed, her bandaged montrals drooping. Every other face in the room is trained on him.

“We lost a man yesterday,” Anakin says, wearily. “Peony was a good man, a good soldier, but most importantly I have been told he was a good brother. I didn’t know him as well as I would have liked, and I do not intend to let that happen again.” He pauses, shifting awkwardly and clenching his metal hand around the railing. Obi-wan had always been so much better at speeches than him, but he will do his best. He owes his men that. 

“You are not, and have never been, faceless soldiers to me or to Ahsoka. I know your names, your faces. I know the way that Jesse walks, and Tig whistles, and Val sings in the shower, but I could know you each better. I  _ will _ know you each better. Even now, I can feel each of you, unique in the Force. And I can feel where Peony is missing. Life aboard the  _ Cin Vhetin _ will be different without him - and maybe the biggest difference will be that no shiny will be sent to take his place. When we die now, when vode lay down their lives in the line of duty, there are no so called replacements to be had. 

“It’s just us, and we have to look out for each other, because if we continue on this path there will be more casualties. If you no longer wish to lay down your lives for strangers, I understand, but Peony gave his life so that others may live free, and I will happily do the same when my time comes and hope that somebody will say my name at the Hour of Remembrance just as we will all say his tonight. Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc,” sometimes the Mandalorian words of remembrance still feel awkward on his tongue, but Anakin no longer stumbles over them as he looks down at the hundreds of men below him, “ni partayli, gar darasuum.”


	13. Every Time We Suffer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a brief bout of Echo's internalized ableism.

**_Cin Vhetin_ ** **, Outer Rim, 67 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

“I miss you, angel,” Anakin sighs. Looking at his own reflection in the holoterminal recording, he barely recognizes himself. His hair, longer than it’s ever been before, is tied back, and his face is gaunt and pale from too many months spent in space. Gone is his golden skin, his chubby boyish cheeks. The scar cutting through his brow stands out darkly and deepens the crow’s feet beginning to appear around his eyes, especially when he smiles self consciously and runs his flesh hand over his hair. “I miss the way your smile lights up a room, but I miss your mind more. You always have an answer. Or,” he chuckles under his breath, remembering Padme scowling and scolding him for putting her on a pedestal, as if she was all knowing and perfect. As if she was really an angel. It was no small part of what destroyed their marriage. “At least, you know the right questions to ask. The right people to go to.

“I don’t have anyone to turn to out here. No, that’s a lie. I have Rex, and Ahsoka. They do their best. More of the men are stepping up to take leadership roles and to make their voices heard, and I’m so kriffing proud of them. I really am. But they all look to me, at the end of the day, to make the hard choices. And I...I never realized how much I relied on you and my Master for guidance. Instead of being grateful I pushed you away. I am...so sorry about that, angel. So very sorry. Tell my Master I miss him, and may the Force be with you both.”

The holoterminal pings as his recording is sent. The message will bounce through too many comm relays to comprehend before arriving in the dead drop Padme’s staff had set up so that they could communicate secretly during their short marriage. It’s proved far more useful in the past few months than it ever was back then. And kriff, he’s grateful that Padme is too good a woman to hate him after he abandoned her, abandoned his order, abandoned his whole life to run off after his padawan. 

Roused from thought by a snore, he glances over his shoulder and sees that Ahsoka is exactly where he left her - sprawled across her bed, only feet from his own, with her face buried in a pillow and his old Jedi robe wrapped tight around her. She’s probably drooling thanks to all the drugs Kix pumped into her to speed recovery and ease the pain of her extensive burns.

One look is enough to remind him that he doesn’t regret following her, not even for a second. She is the little sister he never had, the family that the Order tries so hard to ban them from having. Kriff the Order. She’s worth more than the whole lot of them put together - except, perhaps, for Obi-wan, his Master, his brother in all but blood. Anakin is so lost without him, sometimes barely able to recognize the man he is becoming, a man with so much blood on his hands.

Before he can do anything stupid like try to contact Obi-wan despite his Master’s explicit warnings not to, Anakin shuts down the holoterminal and stumbles over to his own bed. In the morning he will have to deal with the handful of men from the 212th, all of whom are still confined to Kix’s medbay. 

For now, he sleeps, and for once no nightmares find him.

\-------------

Echo’s bad knee is locked painfully, the only way he can keep himself standing for the sixth hour of his self-appointed watch, and he’s long since let his arms fall at his sides rather than holding them stiffly behind his back. Still, he is too proud to give himself the relief of leaning against the wall. Far too proud to take the painkillers sitting uselessly in his belt pouch, though Kix will yell at him for it later, when he walks with more of a limp than usual.

Rex has come and gone several times already, and invited Echo in with him more than once. Each time Echo has refused. He knows his place, and will do his duty until he’s dismissed - and had told Skywalker that it wasn’t his place to dismiss him, even if it is Skywalker’s door he’s standing outside. Other clones have trickled by in ones and twos, asking for updates he doesn’t have, or offering food and drink when it became clear he wasn’t going to budge. Their ration bars sit untouched in one of Echo’s pockets. He’ll eat when he’s off duty, whenever that might be.

\-------------

**_Cin Vhetin_ ** **, Outer Rim, 68 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

“There are six year olds on the battlefield now,” Sergeant Jump says, not quite managing the detached tone of an officer giving a report to his superiors.

Not that Rex and Anakin are his superior officers anymore, Rex supposes, though it still gives him a headache to remember to call his former general by his first name in public no matter how long he’s been doing so in private. He grimaces, and nods for Jump to continue his debrief.

“They’re no better than cannon fodder, and there are hardly enough jetiise left to lead them. Hardly a day goes by without news of another General’s death. And yet....” Jump rubs at his scarred face with the mech hand he received in the first year of the war, its scratched and dented metal surface disguising the fact that Jump could use it to crush a man’s skull with ease. “Rather than ‘waste’ resources on the severely wounded, the GAR has been sending them to Kamino for reconditioning,” Kaminoan code for a quick death, or a thorough mind wipe. “The General began to have suspicions when troops sent for medical treatment stopped coming back, and companies of new brothers were sent instead, I think. So did the rest of us, of course, but we did our duty. We aren’t deserters, sirs, not without the rest of our brothers. We would have gotten on that transport to Kamino, if the General had ordered us too. But he didn’t. He sent us here instead. Said you’d help us, make us whole again.”

Next to Rex, Anakin is nodding slowly. His mech hand is clamped down hard on the desk in Kix’s office, doubtless leaving dents behind, but his face is calm. Only the twitch at the corner of his eye lets Rex know exactly how infuriated he is at the thought of clones being sent to their deaths for curable wounds. Bacta tanks and mechanical limbs are expensive, yes, but that’s the cost of war, and one the Republic used to shoulder willingly. 

“We’ll do our best,” Anakin finally replies, voice even, shoulders back, every inch a general. “Sergeant Rosie’s new leg is going to take a few days to build, but we’re calibrating the new hand and foot for your man Tarly now, and the rest of your men will have whatever they need during their recovery. I’ll personally make sure of it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ll have to stop calling me that, Jump. I’m not a general anymore, and you aren’t a sergeant. We’re all just men here.”

“Forgive me, sir, but that might take a little more time to wrap my head around.”

Anakin laughs, the first real laugh Rex has heard from anyone in days, and paces around Kix’s desk to clap Jump on the shoulder. “Welcome to the  _ Cin Vhetin _ , brother. Take as much time as you need.”

It’s in that moment that something changes. Jump looks down at the floor, scuffing his heel like a nervous shiny in front of his first jetii, and clears his throat. Rex tenses, wondering what other news Jump could possibly have - what could possibly be worse than what he’s already said.

“The General gave me something for you, sir. For you and your padawan. He said I would know the right time to give it to you, and it didn’t seem right when we got here with Skirata hovering over our shoulders. But I’m no jetii, and I figure this is as good a time as any.” 

Rex can’t quite see what Jump pulls out of the satchel he’s been carrying around since he first set foot on the  _ Cin Vhetin _ . All he can see is the shock on Anakin’s face as he reaches out, his flesh hand closing around something and bringing it up for a closer look - a lightsaber.

_ Anakin’s _ lightsaber. Rex has picked it up and returned it to him enough times on the battlefield to recognized the worn, scuffed grip and straight hilt. It had never seemed like the right time to ask what happened to the damned things to start with, why Anakin and Ahsoka had fled into the black without the weapons that they wielded like extensions of their bodies. Rex had figured that, much like the clones’ armor, the weapons had belonged to the masters they were deserting and they had been required to leave them behind, or perhaps even had them confiscated by the Order.

Whatever the reason was, it doesn’t matter now. Anakin’s smile resembles nothing more than the expression Mira had worn just hours ago while showing him all of the candy and trinkets Rex’s brothers had bought for her on Morrow. Rex will have to buy Jump an ale at their next port to thank him for causing such unadulterated joy. For now, he gives his brother an approving nod.

“Thank you, Jump,” Anakin murmurs, his fingers running over every millimeter of the hilt. “I owe you a debt.”

“No, sir, you don’t. I only did as my General asked. But if you feel that way, repay it by taking care of my men. They’re good soldiers. They just need a little rest.”

“I will, vod. I will.”

\----------

Privately, Rex is glad that Jump held off on returning Anakin and Ahsoka’s lightsabers until after the Skiratas were a healthy distance away. Someone would have died thanks to Fives’ stupid stunt with Ordo if Jump had handed them out the moment his boots hit the flight deck. But if he had given them back before they left for the mission, maybe…

No. No, Rex knows better than to second guess the past. 

He turns Ahsoka’s sabers over in his hands, feeling the wear patterns and scratches on the grips. He had been there when she built the second lightsaber, watching in fascination with several of his brothers as Anakin guided her through the process of assembling it with the Force, and shared in her delight when it hummed to life. It’s saved his life more than once since that day.

Rounding the last corner to the cabin Anakin and Ahsoka share - despite plenty of space for them to each have their own suite of rooms - he stops in front of Echo.

“You look like haran, vod’ika,” Rex sighs. “It’s not your fault she’s hurt, you know. If anything, it’s mine. We’d only just called for evac when she came out of that building. There’s nothing you could have done to get there faster, or treat her burns better.”

“It’s my duty to watch my commander’s back,” Echo replies, his gaze fixed firmly on the wall over Rex’s left shoulder. “I should never have agreed to stay behind with the evac team. You needed ARC Troopers on that mission, not shinies.”

“You couldn’t have kept up with us over that distance on foot.” Perhaps it’s a cruel thing to point out, but it’s the truth. Echo is still every inch an ARC Trooper, still more deadly than most of the other men in the GAR, but he’ll never again be able to run miles at a time without tiring, or fight his way through treacherously muddy mining pits. He would have been a liability on the ground and they both know it - denying that won’t help anyone.

Rex can practically hear Echo grinding his teeth in frustration before he bites out, “If I was able--”

“But you aren’t.” Rex rests his left hand on the right side of Echo’s chest, just like he had when his vod was a shiny on Rishi Station. “And this isn’t really about watching your commander’s back, is it, vod’ika? You wouldn’t be standing vigil outside my door, or Skywalker’s. It’s about  _ her _ .”

Echo’s gaze flits from the wall over Rex’s shoulder to his face, then down to the floor between their feet. “When this happened,” he waves his good hand, indicating the scarred half of his face and his stiff, pained posture, “she saved me. Helped Fives carry me off that Sith-damned planet. Meditated with me when I couldn’t even open my mouth to speak. Told the Generals where to shove it when they talked about sending me back to Kamino. Never once questioned whether a soldier who couldn’t fight still had value in an endless war. Still trusts me to watch her back. Except I can’t. Not like you can, not like Fives can. And now she’s hurt and…” Echo swallows hard and finally meets Rex’s eyes. “I’m no medic, Rex, and I don’t have the Force to heal with. I’m just a broken old soldier. I’m no use to her at all.”

“Sometimes, brother, we don’t have to be useful.” It goes against everything they were taught as children on Kamino, where those who weren’t useful were reconditioned or simply discarded, like 99, but Rex knows it to be true. His jetiise have taught him that much. “Sometimes we just have to be there.”

Rex leans in and butts his forehead gently against Echo’s before dropping his hand from his brother’s chest to unclip Ahsoka’s lightsabers from his belt. He steps back, tosses them, and turns away in the same breath, not even stopping to make sure that Echo has caught them. Of course he has. “A gift from General Kenobi, delivered by our new friends from the 212th. She’ll want those back sooner rather than later.”

\---------

Ahsoka isn’t sure how long Echo has been standing outside of her door, in much the same way that she isn’t sure how long it’s been since she returned to the  _ Cin Vhetin _ . Skyguy isn’t much good at Force healing, but he mastered the  _ sleep _ command shortly after acquiring a padawan, and has been using it liberally to help her rest and heal. Her last clear memory is of Kix grumbling while he changed her bacta bandages while Rex and Anakin spoke quietly in the background, of reaching out toward Echo’s familiar presence when the pain of Kix’s work became overwhelming only to run into the durasteel of his mental shields, and then Anakin’s warm fingers on her forehead accompanied by a silent command. 

_ Sleep, little one _ .

And sleep she does, until the soft whoosh of a door sliding open wakes her some indeterminate amount of time later. Probably Kix or Bev coming to poke and prod at her wounds again, or Rex bringing updates about the men in the infirmary and the people they rescued. 

“Permission to enter, Ahsoka?”

Her eyes snap open and she squints through the dim light at the man in her doorway, who’s had her permission to come and go at will for years. At least he hasn’t reverted to calling her commander. 

“I was starting to wonder if you ever would,” she mumbles, still shaking off the dregs of Anakin’s Force compulsion. As it fades, the aches and pains of her wounds flare up again, though not as badly as before. Good. They’ve finally started to heal - though not enough to make pushing herself into a sitting position anything less than excruciating. She grits her teeth and bears it, maneuvering herself on bandaged hands until she can lean back against the wall behind her bunk. “Rex said you needed time to think.”

“Rex is the wisest vod I’ve ever met,” Echo replies. 

Ahsoka frowns at his non-answer. There’s a nervous energy clouding his Force presence, and he’s turning something over and over in his hands. Two somethings. Oblong, each about the size of a - of a - of -

“Echo, are those--”

“Your lightsabers.” He crosses the room in three quick strides, stopping close enough to her bed that he all but blocks out the overhead light and holding them out. “Rex got ‘em from the boys of the 212, said they’re a gift from your grandmaster.”

“Oh.” The hilt of her first lightsaber is scratched and worn, just like she remembers it, and her fingers slide perfectly into the grooves they long ago created on the synthleather grip. Blinking hard against the sting in her eyes she reaches for her shoto, the heavy bandages on her left hand the dull throb of pain in her palm making it harder to close her fingers around its hilt. She does it anyway, her sharp teeth digging into her bottom lip until fresh blood wells. It doesn’t matter - not when she feels almost whole, for the first time since turning her back on the Jedi Temple. “It’s been months, but going into that fight I still felt so…” Trailing off, she sets the lightsabers in her lap, itching to turn them on but afraid of her clumsy, bandaged fingers getting in the way.

“Naked without them,” Echo finishes for her. They’ve spoken about the aching vulnerability left behind by their lost weapons and armor before. “I just wish my vode had seen fit to give them to you sooner.”

“If wishes were fishes,” Ahsoka murmurs. Anakin had picked up that phrase on some backwater planet and delighted in tormenting his former Master with it. She’s sure there’s more to it, but Anakin never can remember the punchlines to the bad jokes and odd sayings he overhears. 

“What?”

“Nothing. Or, not nothing, just - if there’s one thing this war has taught me, that  _ Rex _ has taught me, it’s that there’s no point in wishing we could relive the past. We learn from it, and then we move on.” Her eyes flutter closed against her will, pain and the exhaustion of healing pulling her toward sleep again despite the excitement of regaining her lightsabers. “Besides, if I could wish for anything, it wouldn’t be my lightsabers.”

“Then what would it be?” Echo asks, curiosity in his voice and spiking through his presence in the Force. Ahsoka can feel the air move as he leans closer, always hungry for every bit of knowledge or insight. 

_ For this Sith-damned war to never have started. For the freedom of every clone in the galaxy. For all of us to have more to look forward to than a short, hard life of fighting and waiting to die. _

Scooting over with a grunt of effort, she pats the empty space at the edge of her bunk. “For more of your company, Cho’ika. That’s all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The many lovely mistakes undoubtedly contained in this chapter are brought to you courtesy of the nasty cold that's been keeping me home from work & giving me actual time to write.


	14. (Not) Made of Gold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We moved and adopted a dog, who is very cute and can be seen on my tumblr. This is very short but I'm working on the next chapter and I'm going to try to start posting snippets and short fics on my tumblr a few times a week to keep me more accountable.

**_Cin Vhetin,_ ** **Outer Rim, 75 Days After the Desertion of the 501st**

“Are you sure about this, Snips?” Anakin asks, eying the sterile needles and tiny pots of ink that Bev is setting out in a corner of the med bay. Old fashioned tattooing isn’t technically illegal in Republic space, but flash tattooing is far more sanitary - and more popular, due to its speed and relative lack of pain. So of course, Bev and the men of the 501st picked the painful, bloody old way to mark their bodies.

“Yes,” Ahsoka replies for what feels like the hundredth time. Despite the calm confidence in her voice, she can’t seem to stop tapping a rapid beat on the bed she’s sitting on. It’s a bad habit she picked up from Anakin, a tell, but there are no enemies around to see it, just Anakin and Bev - and Mira, tucked in a chair off to the side and tinkering with a bit of machinery Anakin gave her. 

The girl has taken to following Ahsoka around like a shadow, if shadows were grease-smudged and too curious for their own good. Fives often teases Ahsoka, saying Mira has a crush. Ahsoka, keenly aware of how isolating it can feel to be a female non-human surrounded by a thousand human men, thinks it has more to do with loneliness than anything else, and does her best to have patience for her. It isn’t always easy. At nearly 18, and more than three years a soldier, Ahsoka has little memory of what it was like to be an awkward 12 year old girl-child in the midst of puberty. Sometimes she struggles to even remember what life was like before the war, what the peace and innocence of her youth in the Temple felt like. Mira lost those things long ago, too, first in the destruction of her home planet and then in the harsh care of refugee orphanages and slavers’ ships, but her struggles didn’t forge her into a warrior. Instead they made her careful and quiet, and irritatingly eager to please.

Ahsoka flashes Mira a smile when she looks up from her tinkering before turning her gaze back on Bev. At his nod she strips off her tunic and undershirt, smashing them into a makeshift pillow and laying down on her back with her whole right side exposed. A few shiny burn scars curl around her collarbones and just above the waistline of her pants, where the body armor she was wearing on  _ Karn-11 _ didn’t reach to protect her. Bev swabs something cold on the skin between the healed burns and the other scars on her belly and ribs, tokens from her time on the battlefield, then freehands an outline of the flower he had inked on Peony only a few months ago.

When the tattoo gun begins buzzing, Ahsoka closes her eyes.

\-----------

Ahsoka must have fallen asleep, because the next time she opens her eyes and looks down Bev is half done, and there are several people talking quietly nearby. The low rumble of Rex’s voice draws her attention to the corner where Mira had been sitting when she closed her eyes, only to find it crowded with chairs. Mira is perched on a hospital bed, peering over Rex’s shoulder as best she can when Anakin and Rex’s heads are only inches apart and staring down at a datapad. Seated beside them, Fives has his own datapad in one hand and is balancing Biter on his knee with the other while he bounces her. 

“What’s wrong?” Ahsoka slurs sleepily, starting to sit up only for Bev to push her back down with a forearm across her chest.

“Don’t move,” he warns before going back to his work.

“Master, what’s wrong?”

It’s Rex who answers, and the faint lines bunching around the corners of his eyes set her at ease before he even speaks. “Nothing, ‘Soka. Passengers all safely disembarked and the men are loading our supply orders. We’re just taking stock.”

Fives stands without being asked, drops Biter on the bed next to Mira, and crosses to sit on Ahsoka’s cot beside her head. He tips his datapad screen so that she can see the columns of their carefully laid out budget. 

“Rexter still punishing you with tracking this stuff?” she asks, not waiting for an answer before carefully reaching out to scroll down. “Tell me you’re missing a few zeros.”

“Because of the fire on Karn-11, we weren’t able to recover any of the data terminals or credit reserves we were anticipating. Skywalker’s mission brought in enough to keep us going, but between resupplying and giving everyone we rescued enough credits for a one-way ticket wherever they want to go in the galaxy, we’re running a little low on funds.”

“That’s an understatement,” Ahsoka grumbles. She misses having Grand Army officers to handle the day to day matters of running a ship - planning missions is far more interesting than worrying over rations, fuel and medical supplies. “Nothing’s wrong my shebs.”

“May I remind you that a few months ago we had a stolen ship, a few ration bars, and not a single credit between us?” Anakin butts in as he crosses the room to lean at the foot of her bed, well out of Bev’s way. Sometimes he sounds so much like Obi-wan that Ahsoka’s chest aches with loss. “We’ll get by. We always do.”

“What if we could do better than just get by, sir?” 

It’s Bev, his voice low and steady and his eyes still focused on his work. He wipes a trickle of blue blood out of the hollow of Ahsoka’s hip and sets the buzzing needle back to her skin, which tingles as he shapes another petal on her abdomen. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but some of us got to talking with the boys from Omega while Skirata was here. Started with some bets over the fight - all for Fiv’ika, of course,” he says, flashing a grin at his brother. He’s one of the oldest among the 501st, older even than Fives and therefore entitled to call him by the diminutive whenever the hell he wants, even when it makes Fives’ lip curl in annoyance. “But later one of ‘em mentioned Skirata didn’t really need our money, just our manpower. Something about banks. He clammed up pretty fast after that, but it got some of us thinkin’. The Seppies have their own banking network. Do the Hutts, or any of the other slaving clans?”

“The Hutts do,” Anakin confirms. Ahsoka glances at him to gauge his interest in what Bev has to say, and finds his head tipped to the side thoughtfully and his eyes narrowed. “They handle a lot of money for other criminals, and the Republic all but ignores it.”

“Well, then the Republic wouldn’t much mind if we went about reclaiming some of those ill gotten assets, would they, sir? It’s not rescuing civvies, I know, but it’ll throw a spanner in the works of the Sith-damned slavers if their money isn’t safe, and get us set up better to help everyone we do save.” 

The needle stops humming, and a cool cloth wipes Ahsoka’s burned-feeling skin, followed by gentle fingers coated in some kind of ointment. It takes the edge off, though the smell tells Ahsoka it isn’t bacta - Bev said bacta would pull the ink right out of the tattoo in the healing process and ruin all his work. She’ll have to heal the old fashioned way. Snapping off the gloves he’s been wearing, Bev taps an un-inked part of her hipbone. “You’re all done, So’ika.”

“I like it,” she says, not quite touching the edge of one of the peonies now blossoming in the space between her ribs and right hipbone. “All of it. What do you think, Master? Banks can’t be any harder to destroy than Seppy bases and slave auctions.”

Rex groans as Fives drops his head into his free hand, shaking it slightly. “Don’t say that, Little’un,” Rex chastises. “That’s always how the trouble starts.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow me on tumblr as [unwhithered](http://unwhithered.tumblr.com/).


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